Determinants of Transposition Delay in the European Union

Europeanization involves the transposition and implementation of European legislation in EU member states. Whereas EU policy implementation is explicitly recognized as the responsibility of the member states, the new emphasis on benchmarking recognizes that different implementation strategies can be beneficial, provided the outcome is appropriate. New data representing the full EU transport acquis from 1957 to 2004 and the national transposition instruments derived from data bases for Germany, Greece, the UK, Spain and the Netherlands show that only 39 per cent of the acquis was transposed in time. Why do member states not transpose EU directives on time? Logistic and multinomial logistic analysis explains this in terms of the level of complexity of EU directives; the use of national legal instruments that include considerable de facto veto players; and the shorter the transposition time set in the directive, the more delayed the transposition process.