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Embracing European Law: Compliance with EU
Directives in Central and Eastern Europe
Toshkov, Dimiter
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Toshkov, D. (2008). Embracing European Law: Compliance with EU Directives in Central and Eastern Europe.
European Union Politics, 9(3), 379-402. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116508093490
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Embracing European Law
Compliance with EU Directives in
Central and Eastern Europe
Dimiter Toshkov
Leiden University, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
Accession to the European Union (EU) demands the
adoption of a vast body of legislation. This paper analyses
compliance with EU directives in eight post-communist
countries during the Eastern enlargement and tries to
account for the puzzling embrace of EU law in Central and
Eastern Europe. Drawing on a new data set tracking the
transposition of a sample of 119 directives, the paper finds
effects of both political preferences and government
capacity on the likelihood of timely transposition. Further-
more, important sectoral differences are uncovered, with
trade-related legislation having a better chance and environ-
mental legislation having a significantly worse chance of
being incorporated into national legal systems on time.
Beyond the conditionality of the accession process, the
paper unveils a complex causal structure behind the ups and
downs in transposition performance.
379
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116508093490
Volume 9 (3): 379–402
Copyright© 2008
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore
KEY WORDS
Central and Eastern
Europe
compliance
Enlargement
implementation
transposition
Introduction
The transformations of government and society in Central and Eastern
Europe (CEE) since the beginning of the 1990s have proven a fertile ground
for the study of institutional persistence and change (Elster et al., 1998;
Grzymala-Busse, 2006; Stark and Bruszt, 1998). More recently, the confluence
of these reforms with the European integration of the region presented a rare
chance to witness how internal impulses and external pressure for change
combine to produce patterns of political and policy reforms (Dimitrov et al.,
2006; Vachudova, 2005). This paper deals with the impact of the European
Union (EU) on law and policy-making in CEE. Analysing the adoption of EU
law in the new member states, I explore and try to explain the variation in
the pace of implementing EU directives during the last enlargement in eight
post-communist countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania,
Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.
States aspiring to become members of the EU have to incorporate into
their national legal systems more than 80,000 pages of legislation in the
course of a few years.
1
Given the Herculean proportions of this task, and the
systematic troubles of the ‘old’ member states to transpose EU law on time,
it is a genuine puzzle (and one that has remained largely unnoticed) that the
post-communist countries have been rather successful in adapting to EU law.
As Figure 1 shows, the mean transposition deficit in the new member states
(EU-10) is lower than the average percentage of non-transposed directives in
the EU-15. Furthermore, as of 2007 the best-performing countries are new
entrants and the worst performer amongst the EU-10 still does better than
the worst EU-15 country.
The contributions of this paper go beyond drawing attention to the
unlikely embrace of EU law in CEE. The performance of the new members
is not uniform and important differences across countries, policy sectors and
types of directives exist. In order to address this variation, I perform a
quantitative analysis of a new data set tracking the transposition perform-
ance of the eight countries from the start of the accession negotiations in the
late 1990s until 2005 (a year and a half after the actual enlargement). Using
logistic regression, I attempt to capture simultaneously the effect of EU-level
factors, the national institutional context and the changing landscape of
political preferences in CEE on the likelihood of timely transposition.
2
National government preferences appear related to the rate of incorpor-
ating EU law. Both government positions on a socioeconomic left/right scale
and attitudes towards EU accession have a significant effect on the likelihood
of timely transposition. The capacity of governments to transpose is, however,
constrained by a high number of parties in government and bureaucratic
European Union Politics 9(3)
380
quality, as well as by the regulatory environment in a country. Directives
related to trade barriers have higher chances of being implemented within
the deadline, whereas implementing legislation, highly politically complex
laws and costly directives are more likely to suffer delays.
The findings of the analysis have considerable societal relevance because
the transposition of European legislation is the basis of the internal market.
A detailed knowledge of the state of implementation and the reasons behind
the ups and downs in the member states’ performance is valuable for policy
experts, as well as for social scientists. The comparative study of the adoption
of EU law in CEE presents a new setting for applying and testing the growing
number of implementation/compliance theories, but it also provides insight
into how policy-making in transition settings works.
The article is structured as follows. The next section places the current
text in the context of EU enlargement, transposition and implementation
studies. The discussion of the contributions and shortcomings of existing
work is followed by a section explicating the theoretical arguments investi-
gated in the empirical analysis. Next, the operationalization, data collection
and research methodology are presented in some detail. The subsequent
section contains the results of the empirical analysis. Lastly, the conclusion
sums up the findings.
Toshkov Embracing European Law
381
0
2.5
5
2004 2005 2006 2007
Non-transposed directives as a percentage of all
EU15 (min) EU15 (mean) EU15 (max)
EU10 (min) EU10 (mean) EU10 (max)
Figure 1 Transposition deficit in the EU (2004–2007).
Mean (14.34) and maximum
(40.4) values for EU-10 in 2004 are truncated
. Own data compilation based on the
European Commission’s Internal Market Scoreboards.
Theorizing transposition in the context of enlargement
negotiations
The problem of adapting to EU law in CEE is of major interest for two
research agendas: understanding the unfolding and the impact of the last EU
enlargement round, and understanding compliance in a multi-level system
of governance. The intersection of these two research areas provides the
immediate intellectual context of the current study.
Relatively few studies directly address the question of transposing/
implementing EU rules in the new member states. Studies that are built on a
comparative approach or a systematic empirical analysis are even harder to
find. One of the few exceptions is the study by Hille and Knill (2006), who
construct a measurable indicator of implementation performance in CEE for
the period from 1999 to 2003 and try to match the resulting patterns with the
bureaucratic strength of the governments and the national political
constraints. The authors conclude that ‘the functioning and the quality of the
domestic bureaucracy constitute crucial preconditions for effective alignment
with EU policy requirements’ (Hille and Knill, 2006: 549). The study, however,
employs a rather indirect measure of implementation performance – an
indicator measuring ‘the frequency, direction and intensity of criticism or
approval of the candidate countries’ performances’ as expressed in the
European Commissions’ reports on the progress towards accession (Hille and
Knill, 2006: 541). A further shortcoming is the possible endogeneity of the
dependent variable and the major explanatory factor – bureaucratic quality
as measured by the expert ratings collected for the World Bank governance
indicators. Although the use of expert scores to assess various aspects of
governance is not problematic as such, the analysts’ assessments are likely to
stem at least to some degree from the criticisms or approvals contained in the
Commission reports.
The relatively strong explanatory power of administrative efficiency
vis-à-vis party political preferences and institutional factors is also uncovered
in an analysis of the transposition and implementation of social policy
directives (Toshkov, 2007). Measuring the legislative ‘productivity’ of the CEE
applicants in each six-month period from 1998 to 2005, the study finds
administrative efficiency to have a strong and positive effect, government EU
integration support to have a smaller but still significant impact and left/right
ideological positions to have no effect at all. Owing to the peculiarities of the
social policy sector, however, it is an open question whether these results can
be generalized to the entire spectrum of EU activities.
The adaptation in the social policy field has also been analysed in depth
in the cases of Poland (Leiber, 2007) and Slovakia (Dimitrova and Rhinard,
European Union Politics 9(3)
382
