Beyond the Member State: Sub-National Compliance with European Union Legislation

This paper posits the following research question: To what extent is there variance in the compliance of EU legislation across European regions and why? Despite the growing importance of sub-national levels in implementing EU law, most research to date can be said to be “region blind” and focuses on compliance at member state level. One of the frequently cited arguments is that decentralisation makes compliance with EU legislation more difficult by increasing institutional blockages and veto players. The aim of this paper is to further explore this relationship by examining the non-compliance in regions of decentralized states. An analytical framework is built that includes factors at EU, state and regional levels which may explain levels of non-compliance. This framework is then tested against infringement proceedings that involve regions in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain for the years 2000-2015. This research will add at least three innovations to the current state of the literature: First, the analysis of a new dataset with detailed information about the performance of regions (regarding their compliance with EU legislation) in decentralized European member states; second, a comparative analysis between the regions that perform better and those that perform worse in the implementation of EU legislation and the causes behind this performance; and finally, we will perform a systematic analysis with a higher number of cases (than in previous studies) which will validate in a more consistent way previous findings reached through the analysis of case studies.