Domestic Parliamentary Scrutiny and Compliance with EU Law

The literature on compliance with EU law has nourished the hopes that the empowerment of national parliaments may help overcome implementation delay. Recently, it has been argued that the scrutiny of European law proposals by national parliaments contributes to speeding up the implementation of EU law. To test this argument, we study the effect of parliamentary scrutiny on the compliance of nine EU member states with all directives adopted between 1999 and 2012. We start by arguing that transposition delays are often rooted in existing information asymmetries. In case these asymmetries have not been successfully flattened before an EU directive is adopted, they must be flattened afterwards, that is, through extensive deliberations and negotiations during the implementation phase. Parliamentary scrutiny can be seen as a tool to shift the necessary exchange of information to an earlier stage of the law-making process. We test this argument using proposal-level data on scrutiny behavior as a variable that conditions the duration of EU law implementation. We focus on three established explanations for transposition delays which point towards a proposal’s complexity, a political system’s decision-making capacity and domestic actors’ policy preferences. Overall, our results indicate that parliamentary scrutiny has mixed effects which cannot be understood without considering the different parties’ motives for initiating scrutiny activities in the first place. These motives, however, depend on the political system and, therefore, their relevance varies across countries. On the one hand, when analyzing the national implementation of EU policy, parliamentary scrutiny should be considered as a tool which successfully transfers necessary deliberations and negotiations from the implementation stage to the policymaking stage. On the other hand, parliamentary scrutiny carries the risk of triggering conflict among adversarial actors and of forcing early commitments by actors who might otherwise have remained passive observers.