1,721,093 research outputs found
Social Policy:Problem Solving Gaps, Partial Exits and Court-Decision Traps
Get PDFNotwithstanding some persistent, and likely irresolvable, problem-solving gaps, Social Europe has escaped the joint-decision trap on a regular basis. Most importantly, Treaty base games and arena shifting helped to bring about more secondary law and ECJ-driven political decisions than might have been expected considering the decision rules. Furthermore, progressive steps in European social integration were induced by a 'court-decision trap'. Two examples are studied in depth: health care, and the integration and eventual exportability of social minimum benefits. Indeed, relevant integration was deepened significantly although neither the founding persons of the Treaties nor the governments were willing to create a cross-border market for health care or open social assistance related benefits for exportability.</p
Making Dead Letters Live: Strategies to Improve the Effectiveness of EU Legislation in Central and Eastern Europe
Get PDFAs many empirical studies have shown, non-compliance with EU legislation has already been a significant phenomenon within the EU15. With the accession of twelve new Member States since 2004, all of which had to align their legal and administrative systems to the acquis communautaire within a very short time frame, the compliance issue has become even more pressing. Against this background, it is the aim of this paper to take a closer look at how four new Member States from Central and Eastern Europe fare in implementing EU legislation and how possible compliance problems could be remedied in the future. The paper presents findings from a comparative project on the transposition, enforcement and application of EU legislation from the fields of working time and equal treatment in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. The results show that while transposition performance is relatively good, all four countries are marked by significant problems in application and enforcement. On the basis of intense focus group sessions involving practitioners from the four countries, the paper presents a set of strategies to improve the current state of affairs and concludes with some remarks on the chances for these options to be actually put into practice in the new Member States
The First EU Social Partner Agreement in Practice: Parental Leave in the 15 Member States. IHS Political Science Series: 2004, No. 96
Get PDFIn this paper, we analyze the impact of one specific EU social policy measure, the Parental Leave Directive. This Directive is based on the first Euro-collective agreement, concluded in November 1995 by the ETUC, UNICE and CEEP. Contrary to the rather sceptical assessments presented by many observers at the time of its adoption, our in-depth analysis of the Directive's implementation in all 15 member states reveals rather far-reaching effects. The Directive induced significant policy reforms in the majority of member states and thus facilitated the reconciliation of work and family life for many working parents. These effects were not only brought about by compliance with the compulsory minimum standards of the Directive, but also by a considerable number of voluntary reforms. We argue that domestic party politics and processes of policy learning may explain the occurrence of these "unforced" changes, which have hitherto received little attention by Europeanisation scholars
Problems of operationalization and data in EU compliance research
Get PDFSubstantial theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances have been made in research on the implementation of EU policies during recent years. However, our findings have remained ambivalent and our theoretical insights disparate. It therefore seems high time to address some issues that cause concern in this type of research and to raise awareness of the limits of the various theoretical approaches and of the data commonly used. This relates to the challenges of operationalising and of choosing adequate indicators for the dependent variable (compliance). We also discuss promises and pitfalls of different types of data used in the field, such as official statistics on notifications and infringements published by the European Commission as well as mass surveys. -- Die EU-Implementationsforschung hat in den letzten Jahren wesentliche theoretische, konzeptuelle und empirische Fortschritte gemacht. Die Ergebnisse sind jedoch ambivalent und unsere theoretischen Erkenntnisse noch immer disparat. Es scheint deshalb an der Zeit einige Problemfelder dieses Forschungszweigs zu benennen und die Sensibilität für die Reichweite verschiedener methodischer Ansätze und Arten von Daten zu vergrößern. Dies gilt für die Operationalisierung der Kernkonzepte und für die Wahl angemessener Indikatoren, um die abhängige Variable (Rechtsbefolgung) zu erklären. Darüber hinaus diskutieren wir die Vor- und Nachteile der verschiedenen Arten von Daten, die von den meisten Studien genutzt werden. Es handelt sich um offizielle Statistiken über Notifizierungen und Vertragsverletzungsverfahren, die die EU Kommission veröffentlicht, und um Umfragedaten.
In Search of the Worlds of Compliance: Promises and Pitfalls of Quantitative Testing. IHS Political Science Series Paper No. 113, July 2007
Get PDFThe “worlds of compliance” typology as developed by Falkner/Treib/Hartlapp/Leiber (2005) builds on ideal-typical procedural modes of domestic adaptation to EU directives. Recently, the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) has published an interesting article discussing this concept. At closer inspection, the analysis presented by Dimiter Toshkov results in some support for, but also some criticism of, the worlds of compliance. His statistics-based approach gives us the opportunity to raise several issues of crucial importance for the entire scholarly community in the field of EU implementation research. Among these are the problem of choosing adequate indicators, of using reliable quantitative data, and of appropriately applying domestic politics approaches and veto player theory. These discussions are of general interest also for a very practical reason: similar methodological choices are rather common in current European integration research
Transforming social policy in Europe? The EC's parental leave directive and misfit in the 15 member states
Get PDFThis paper presents first results from a collaborative research project which analyzes the national transposition, enforcement and application of six European labor law Directives in all 15 member states. Looking at the case of the EC's parental leave Directive (1996), it draws conclusions about the domestic impact of European social policy standards. It will interest practitioners as much as labor law experts that, in fact, adaptational pressure was created in all 15 member states. Although the overall economic impact of the Directive in terms of costs was rather modest, every single country had to change its rules. While misfit was rather small in Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, the other member states were confronted with significant adaptation pressure. Political theorists may be surprised that our results cast doubts on the theoretical usefulness of focusing too much on matches or mismatches between European policies and domestic structures. We show that a very low degree of misfit may sometimes even be a problem rather than a condition for success and that the existence of considerable adaptational pressure may under certain conditions even be conducive to smooth implementation. In addition, several member states not only eliminated the misfit created by the Directive, but raised their domestic standards above the European minimum requirements. -- Dieses Papier stellt erste Ergebnisse eines Projektverbundes vor, der die rechtliche Umsetzung, administrative Durchführung und praktische Anwendung von sechs arbeitsrechtlichen EG-Richtlinien in allen 15 Mitgliedstaaten untersucht. Anhand der Richtlinie zum Elternurlaub (1996) werden hier die Auswirkungen europäischer Sozialstandards auf der nationalen Ebene behandelt. Für Praktiker und Arbeitsrechtsexperten gleichermaßen interessant dürfte unser Befund sein, dass die Richtlinie tatsächlich in allen Mitgliedstaaten Anpassungen nötig machte. Obwohl die von der Richtlinie verursachten Kosten insgesamt eher gering waren, musste doch jedes Land seine Regulierungen ändern. Während die erforderlichen Reformen in Deutschland, Finnland, Frankreich, Portugal, Spanien und Schweden von eher begrenzter Tragweite waren, sahen sich die übrigen Mitgliedstaaten mit beträchtlichem Anpassungsbedarf konfrontiert. Theoretisch Interessierte werden feststellen, dass unsere Ergebnisse Zweifel daran erwecken, ob die im Rahmen der Prognose des Anpassungserfolges bislang gängige Orientierung an der Größe des verursachten Anpassungsbedarfes wirklich sinnvoll ist. Wir zeigen, dass sehr kleiner misfit manchmal die erfolgreiche Anpassung sogar behindern kann, und dass hoher Anpassungsbedarf unter bestimmten Bedingungen größeren Erfolg verspricht. Darüber hinaus haben mehrere Mitgliedstaaten im Zuge der Implementation nicht nur die notwendigen Anpassungen vorgenommen, sondern ihre nationalen Standards über das von der Richtlinie geforderte Maß hinaus verändert.
EU trade policy : persistent liberalisation, contentious protectionism
No full textHow has EU trade policy responded to the protracted economic crisis starting in 2008? Unlike during the Great Depression of the 1930s, politicians have not resorted to protectionist measures to try to contain the downturn. The response has been just the opposite, with the dominant discourse arguing that in times of austerity and private deleveraging, trade liberalisation is indispensable for restoring growth. Adopting a historical-institutionalist perspective, we argue that the crisis has had an asymmetric effect on the two most important subsystems of EU trade policy. On the one hand, the EU took a leap forward on the path of bilateral free trade liberalisation by starting negotiations with the US, Canada and Japan. On the other hand, proposals to continue with
permissive reforms for the adoption of trade defence easures and to give the EU more leverage vis-à-vis merging economies have been blocked. We thus conclude that EU trade policy after the crisis has shown asymmetric continuity, where the liberalisation trend has been resumed more radically while accompanying defensive reforms to ease the potential pain of liberalisation have run into a stalemate
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