For people of the Union to benefit from its various legal acts and their rights as citizen, Member States need to effectively enforce EU law. The European institutions – especially the European Commission – rely heavily on cooperation with the Member States for the transposition and implementation. However, not all Member States are doing their ”homework” right and/or on time. This is not only lowering the everyday benefits for citizen and businesses but can lead to full-fledged conflict and internal crisis.
In this seminar we seek to understand the importance of Member State´s compliance with EU law, explain the consequences of (regular) non-compliance and the effects of late transposition, and analyse the variance in Member State´s compliance across time and issues.
The following questions will be raised in the seminar: Why does compliance matter? Why do Member States not comply with EU law? What are predictors for late-transposition and non-compliance? Does the EU have a compliance crisis? How does ”compliance” relate to the bigger questions of European integration?
To answer these questions, this class will:
- Analyse the Annual Reports of the European Commission on compliance
- Discuss traditional and recent compliance research
- Link compliance to different theories of EU integration
- Discuss recent popular cases of non-compliance
- Use existing and collect own data on compliance in the EU
- Develop own research questions on Member State´s compliance
- Test established and ”new” predictors for Member State´s compliance / timely transposition
- Dozent/in: Darius Ribbe