Overcoming Regional Blindness ꟷ Determinants of Subnational Compliance Variation

Research on compliance asks the question why some member states comply better with EU legislation than others. Most of the time, the subnational level of governance is granted no specific status in these studies apart from the structural argument that federal states comply worse than unitary states. This paper goes beyond state-centrism and grants the subnational level its own agency. It argues that in a context of a multi-level system with a primary focus on regulatory policy, the EU and member states are heavily reliant upon the subnational level to implement their policies. The European Commission’s Agenda for Better Regulation as well as the increased acknowledgement of the subsidiarity principle in the Lisbon Treaty give due credit to this. Explaining compliance variation between subnational authorities (SNAs) requires a “downscaling” of existing theoretical frameworks. Building on the insights of the three main compliance schools (management, enforcement, and legitimacy), I formulate hypotheses about the impact of subnational capacities, power, and attitudes on compliance. The design used to test these hypotheses employs a new dataset of subnational transposition measures adopted by SNAs in the REGLEG group (Regions with legislative powers). Focussing on transposition delay as the most visible type of infringement, I start by mapping out interregional differences that exist both between and within EU member states. I move on to potential explanations of these differences through advanced statistical multi-level modelling. The findings of the study suggest that subnational characteristics have little explanatory power to account for variation in transposition delay. Neither a region’s level of resources nor the population’s trust in the EU nor the incentive structure (amount of structural funding, population size, parliamentary oversight) are significant predictors of subnational compliance behaviour. Instead, two alternative explanations related to the policy sector and the legal act, namely misfit and complexity, seem to be responsible for difficulties on the subnational level in transposing EU legislation in time. EU environmental policy is particularly prone to subnational non-compliance as it encroaches deeply on pre-existing legal frameworks and generates substantial misfit with local practices and attitudes. More complex policies, in turn, are dealt with in priority by subnational authorities due to resource shortages. This increases their likelihood of being transposed in time. Beyond questions of methodological validity and potential improvements of data availability on the subnational level, the study points to several avenues for further research: How can we collect further data on subnational compliance with EU law? What is SNAs’ impact on compliance beyond legal transposition? How do factors on the subnational and the national level interact when we open the member state black-box? And are similar mechanisms observable in the group of “weaker” SNAs outside the REGLEG group? The paper also highlights the need to collect more data on sectoral characteristics in order to understand why some policies generate more misfit than others.