Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

by: Ulrich Sedelmeier

The Europeanisation of candidate countries and new members is a rather
recent and still comparatively small, but - particularly since 2003 — a
fast-growing research area. Research in this area has developed primarily in
the context of the EU’s eastern enlargement. More recently, a small number
of theoretically informed, book-length studies of the EU’s influence on the
East Central European candidate countries have established the
Europeanisation of applicant states as a distinctive research area. These
studies fit within a common conceptual framework, which draws on the debate
between rationalist and constructivist institutionalist theories in
International Relations and Comparative Politics. This framework makes these
studies highly compatible with analyses of the Europeanisation of member
states, with which they share one key empirical finding, namely that the
impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and
issue areas. On the other hand, the theoretical implications of these
findings appear more clear-cut than in the case of the Europeanisation of
member states: rationalist institutionalism, with its focus on the external
incentives underpinning EU conditionality, and on the material costs
incurred by domestic veto players, appears well suited to explaining
variation in the patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. The
next stage of this research agenda concerns the impact of accession on the
dynamics of pre-accession Europeanisation and how durable the patterns of
candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage.

The aggregating function of political parties in EU decision-making

by: Christopher J. Lord

This Living Review uses concepts of aggregation to analyse what we do and do
not know about the contribution of political parties to the politics and
democratic performance of the European Union. It suggests that
present representative structures are better at aggregating `choices of
policies’ than `choices of leaders’. Much more, however, needs to be done to
analyse the causal contribution of party actors to those patterns of
aggregation, and to understand why European Union parties do not develop
further where aggregation seems to be deficient in the EU arena.

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

by: Oliver Treib

This essay takes stock of the literature on how European Union policies are
being put into practice by the member states. It first provides an overview
of the historical evolution of the field. After a relatively late start in
the mid 1980s, the field has meanwhile developed into one of the growth
industries within EU research. The paper identifies three different waves of
EU implementation scholarship. The first wave considered implementation
primarily a problem of institutional efficiency. In the second wave, the
degree of compatibility between European demands and domestic policy
legacies took centre stage. However, many second-wave scholars complemented
the basic “misfit” argument with a set of additional explanatory factors
to account for deviant cases. In the third wave, some researchers began to
stress the role of domestic politics, while others re-discovered the
importance of administrative capabilities. As an attempt to synthesise some
of the partial explanations presented by earlier research, one group of
scholars pointed to the existence of culturally-shaped country clusters,
each with its own typical style of complying with EU legislation.

After this historical overview, the paper summarises the most important
theoretical, empirical and methodological lessons to be drawn from existing
studies and it discusses promising avenues for future research. First, most
scholars seem to agree on the basic set of factors that may have an impact
on transposition processes. The main task to be accomplished by future
research is to establish under which conditions which configurations of
factors prevail. While we already know that there are strong
country-specific patterns, the importance of sector-specific patterns will
need to be explored further. Second, much more research efforts will have to
be devoted to the neglected area of enforcement and application. In
theoretical terms, going back to the insights of traditional domestic
implementation research seems to be most promising for this type of studies.
Third, the paper cautions against the poor quality of the data employed by
the growing number quantitative compliance studies. Unless the problems with
the data can be solved, scholars are well advised to rely on comparative
case studies, at least in addition to statistical analyses. To increase the
number of cases to be covered by qualitative research, the paper makes the
case for crafting collaborative qualitative research projects as a viable
alternative to quantitative research.