Documents Treib, Oliver 10 results

"What does EU law truly mean for the member states? Do they abide or don't they? This book presents the first encompassing and in-depth empirical study of the effects of 'voluntaristic' and (partly) 'soft' EU policies in all 15 member states. The authors examine 90 case studies across a range of EU Directives and shed light on burning contemporary issues in political science, integration theory, and social policy. They reveal that there are major implementation failures and that, to date, the European Commission has not been able adequately to perform its control function. While all countries are occasional non-compliers, some quite frequently privilege their domestic political concerns over performance of their EU-related duties. Others neglect these EU obligations as a matter of course. This innovative study answers questions of crucial importance for politics in theory and in practice, and suggests how implementation of EU law can be fostered in the future."

"The existing literature on EU policy implementation and Europeanisation presents a diverse array of hypotheses on the reasons for implementation success or failure. Based on the empirical results from our 90 case studies on the implementation of six EU social policy Directives in 15 member states, this chapter discusses the most important of these hypotheses as well as a number of new ones that we formulated on the basis of our own theoretical considerations. At first sight, a rather untidy picture emerges. While most factors have some explanatory power for our cases, there is no single overriding variable (nor even a small set of variables) that may account for the transposition performance of the 15 member states. Nevertheless, some causal conditions turn out to be more important than others. We argue that, contrary to intergovernmentalist assumptions, the “upstream phase” (i.e. features of the EU decision-making process) has only a limited impact on the “downstream phase” of adaptation at the national level. Hence, the behaviour of a government in the “uploading” process tells us little about its performance in “downloading” the policies adopted in Brussels. Among the EU-level factors, a more important role is played by the legal quality of the underlying Directives. Thus, we have observed several cases where transposition problems occurred because the underlying provisions were worded vaguely or lacked clarity and consistency."

"In der öffentlichen Debatte um den Sozialstaat in Deutschland wird selten wahrgenommen, dass es auf europäischer Ebene inzwischen einen beachtlichen Rechtsbestand gibt, der auf die nationalen Politiken Einfluss nimmt. Der Aufsatz analysiert die quantitative Relevanz und qualitative Wirkung sozialpolitischer EU-Richtlinien in den Mitgliedstaaten. Er präsentiert Befunde aus zwei mehrjährigen Forschungskooperationen, die auf einer breiten vergleichenden Basis alle Länder der EU-15 sowie vier mittelosteuropäische Länder einbeziehen. Chancen und Grenzen arbeitsrechtlicher EU-Mindeststandards einer "Union der 25 plus" werden erörtert. Trotz teilweise massiver Implementationsprobleme haben die untersuchten Richtlinien in einer ganzen Reihe arbeitsrechtlicher Bereiche zu einer Reduktion der Unterschiede zwischen Mitgliedstaaten geführt. Eine weitere Angleichung könnte erzielt werden, wenn auch die teils eklatanten Anwendungs- und Vollzugsprobleme sowohl in alten als auch neuen Mitgliedstaaten entschlossener angegangen würden."

"The European Union's (EU) Youth Guarantee aims to improve the labour market situation of young people. Rather than prescribing a uniform policy model, it acknowledges that supportive measures need to align with national, regional and local circumstances. It thus seeks to promote mutual policy learning through the open method of coordination. As an innovative measure, the EU has deployed funding programmes to support the domestic measures related to the Youth Guarantee. We therefore examined in this study whether this mix of recommendations and financial incentives has entailed a convergence of member state policies. Our analysis of policy outputs for the period 2007−2014 yields a mixed empirical picture. There is catching‐up convergence regarding policies' sectoral coverage but increasing divergence concerning the number of adopted policy instruments. The first two years of financial incentives did not produce any effect on enhancing policy experimentation among less active member states. We offer an optimistic and a pessimistic interpretation of these findings.."