The rise of voluntary dispute resolution and policy enforcement in the EU

Compliance with EU law and enforcement of EU policies is embedded in a complex set of institutional mechanisms situated across different levels of governance. These institutions span the full range from ‘soft’ voluntary exchange of information to ‘managed’ and ‘negotiated’ compliance to ‘hard’ enforcement mechanisms backed by legally-binding judgments of Court of Justice of the European Union and, ultimately, the threat of financial penalties imposed on the member states. Over the past ten years, a number of new institutional developments have occurred that have put voluntary dispute settlement mechanisms into a more central position within the institutional framework. SOLVIT and EU Pilot both aim to ‘unload’ the regular infringement procedures from cases that can be solved without the close involvement of the Commission or the courts. These developments have indeed decreased the number of open infringements, but their broader implications for policy enforcement in the EU have not been systematically explored yet. This paper presents an analysis of the trends in the general indicators that track the performance of the infringement procedures – such as, number of open cases, share of cases settled before the involvement of the ECJ, and cases won by the Commission at the judicial stage – over the past 12 years. The analysis pays special attention on the impact of the voluntary dispute resolution mechanisms on these indicators. The identification strategy relies on the fact that these mechanisms entered into use at different years in the various EU member states which allows us to isolate their impact from other contemporarious developments. The paper also discusses the normative implications and trade-offs involved in the growing reliance on alternatives to infringement procedures back by the power of the court to resolve problems with compliance with EU law.