I’ll See You In Court! Why Some European Union Non-compliance Cases End Up in the European Court of Justice

The European Union enforcement mechanism (infringement proceedings) has two identifiable stages. The first is a management stage in which the Commission and the Member State government try to solve the non-compliance through negotiations. If this fails, then the case is referred to the European Court of Justice, which can ultimately sanction non-compliance (an enforcement stage). The question this paper addresses is why some cases are resolved at the management stage, while others proceed to the enforcement stage. The research aims to build on at least two gaps in the current literature. Firstly, to date compliance studies in the EU have largely ignored what happens once non-compliance has been identified, instead focusing only on why Member States initially fail to comply. Secondly, whereas the dominant approach to studying non-compliance in the EU has been to look at cross-state comparisons based on administrative capacities, fewer studies look at cross-policy variations based on non-compliance. Building hypotheses related to the structure of the infringement case and the preferences of the MS governments, the work presents and tests these arguments on a brand new dataset which includes infringement cases from the Member States: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Finland, Italy, Spain & United Kingdom between the years 2002-2014.