Drawing attention to the ‘right’ issues and taking the policy positions that are attractive to voters is at the core of party competition. Numerous studies have shown how this logic shapes various party activities such as posing parliamentary questions or drafting election manifestos. Our paper examines the explanatory power of positional and issue competition when it comes to the transposition of European law. We argue that parties have incentives to transpose EU directives more swiftly when they touch upon issues they ‘own’ and when the content of the directives concerned is close to policies the parties regard to be salient. Green parties, for example, are hypothesized more eager to transpose environmental policies while conservative parties make greater transposition efforts in the area of economic policies. These party-specific incentives are further moderated by coalition dynamics. We test our theoretical argument empirically in the multi-level setting of Germany at the national and subnational level. Particularly, the state-level provides for a laboratory-like setup as it offers a promising variance of government compositions while holding constant numerous potential confounding factors. Our novel dataset comprises detailed information on about 5000 measures transposing about 2000 directives on the state and federal level between 1990 and 2017. Connecting the literature on EU law transposition and party competition our paper makes a novel contribution to various literature strands.
