Zooming in on transposition : national execution measures for EU directives 1986 - 2002

This study empirically investigates the transposition patterns of European Union EU directives in 15 Member States and in 5 major sectors of the economy with a view to analysing the politicaleconomic reasons behind sector and national differences in national execution measures. Specifically, we analyse whether, in the course of transposition, EU directives pass the respective national parliaments or not. Neglected in the scientific literature so far, this question is highly relevant from a normative political perspective and complements the debate on the EU's; democratic deficit by focusing on the national implementation of EU law. Based on information contained in CELEX and EUR-lex, our newly constructed dataset allows us to analyse Member States' transposition performances in a novel fashion, namely across time, Member States as well as policy areas. Our empirical analysis reveals generally low primary transposition ratios. Put differently, most of EU directives are transposed by national executives rather than national legislators. Further, remarkable differences in primary transposition ratios are detected along all three data dimensions. We hypothesize that national political-institutional constellations, economic sector characteristics and EU membership benefits are the main explanatory factors behind these differences.