3.3 Theoretical Progress Despite Little Cumulativeness

The methodological problems discussed in the previous section notwithstanding, we can conclude that the body of literature as it exists today has taught us a lot about the logic of implementing EU legislation. As far as transposition is concerned, it seems to be commonly accepted by now that our theoretical explanations should be informed by well-established theoretical mechanisms from comparative politics and international relations research. In this context, scholars also seem to accept that we need to take into account both structural and agency-related factors, that is administrative and political capacity variables as well as factors determining the willingness of domestic actors. Among the former, the most significant variables appear to be administrative efficiency and veto players. With regard to the latter, many studies have pointed to the relevance of political preferences of governments and interest groups as well as cultural dispositions. Moreover, there seem to be different configurations and different relative weights of these factors in different cases. More research is still needed to determine which types of cases are marked by what type of typical transposition pattern. There is strong evidence suggesting that transposition styles differ between countries or, more precisely, between country clusters. In contrast, we know comparatively little about the cross-sectoral variance of transposition patterns within member states. For example, it seems quite plausible theoretically that transposition is different in rather technical policy areas than in highly politicised ones, at least in countries where politicisation in general is a typical feature.

With regard to enforcement and application, progress has been less pronounced. In fact, contributions addressing the crucial phase of practical implementation “on the ground” have decreased recently, compared to the first and especially the second waves of research. However, it seems to be clear by now that the theoretical models employed to explain the way member states translate the law into action need to be different from the approaches used to explain transposition. Future research will be well advised to make more extensive use of the theoretical insights gained from domestic implementation research since it does not seem to make a major conceptual difference whether we look at how domestic legislation stemming from a European directive or how purely domestic law is being put into practice.

One thing that could and should be avoided by future research is the lack of cumulativeness that has marked some of the literature so far. Keeping track of supportive or contradictory evidence in relation to certain hypotheses is not an easy task if scholars fail to relate their findings to these hypotheses. For example, compliance approaches derived from the international relations literature seem to have become more and more fashionable recently, especially in the area of statistical research. If these analyses find support for the argument that administrative capabilities are important determinants for (non)compliance, it is certainly interesting to discuss this finding in terms of the management approach. For the progress of EU implementation research as a whole, however, it would be even more desirable to link these results back to theoretical arguments presented by Siedentopf and Ziller (1988 ) and others at a time when IR compliance approaches were not yet en vogue. Another example is a recent paper by van der Vleuten (2005 ), which presents evidence from a study on the implementation of EU gender equality policies in France, Germany and the Netherlands. The author argues that “the willingness to implement depends on the economic and ideological costs of policy change and on the amount of pressure exercised by societal actors” (van der Vleuten 2005: Abstract) (van der Vleuten 2005 : Abstract). This interesting result would have been much easier to digest by the scholarly community if the author had pointed out that her findings are very much in line with Börzel’s pull-and-push model presented five years earlier (Börzel 2000 ).

In sum, EU implementation research has made considerable theoretical progress over the last decades. Future research will thus be able to start from a considerably broader set of knowledge than the early contributions of the 1980s. The extent to which further progress will be made, however, also depends on the ability of the scholarly community to organise its research in a constructive and cumulative way.