Abstract
By focusing on legal compliance, EU policy implementation research has neglected more fine-grained differences in transposition. The top-down focus on compliance might not necessarily explain why member states transcend the EU’s requirements to facilitate context-sensitive problem solving. Can prominent compliance theories account for customization? Moving beyond compliance, this chapter scrutinizes the conditions under which four European Union (EU) member states customize EU food safety policies. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and formal theory evaluation, I assess how policy and country-level factors interact. Results reveal that different customization styles simultaneously reflect the interplay between domestic politics and institutions, and the “fit” of EU regulatory modes with domestic sectoral interventionist styles. Compliance approaches cannot fully explain these fine-grained patterns of Europeanization.
This chapter draws in parts from Thomann, E. 2015. Customizing Europe: Transposition as bottom-up implementation. Journal of European Public Policy 22(10): 1368–1387. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.informaworld.com.
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Notes
- 1.
I hereafter interpret the term “typically” as a consistent statement of sufficiency.
- 2.
Directive 90/167/EEC was amended as the European Parliament (EP) and the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) urged for more precise rules, additional regulations, and more detailed definitions without exemption. The EP approved Directive 2001/82/EC without amendment; the EESC recommended that current technical terminology be adopted. Commission Directive 2006/130/EC did not involve stakeholders (source: Eur-Lex).
- 3.
Pearson’s R for interventionist styles and customization restrictiveness: 0.47 (r2 = 0.22); COERC and CUST: 0.30 (r2 = 0.092).
- 4.
The full replication material as well as the truth tables, assumptions made on logical remainders, and all solution types are reported in the online appendix which is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PJTOCG.
- 5.
The veto player dataset is available at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/tsebelis/veto_players_data (accessed 10 July 2014).
- 6.
The intermediate solution features a fifth path “resp*res*VPO*coerc”. This path is theoretically very interesting, since it includes an inflexible EU rule. However, its unique coverage is zero and it only covers one case: the rules for actors who may administer off-label veterinary drugs in Austria under the Cascade rule, i.e. when there is a supply shortfall. In such situations, the drugs are either not authorized for the species under question, or not for the condition under question, or both. The EU rule defines veterinarians and livestock holders as the only actors allowed to administer drugs. Austria is the only country that has forbidden livestock holders to administer in these cases; only veterinarians are allowed to do so. In other countries, the administration of the drugs only has to be supervised by a veterinarian or not at all (UK ), and is sometimes restricted to certain types of drugs. Due to the comparatively small size of the veterinary pharmaceutical market, and due to the importance of agriculture, supply shortfalls for rare conditions or species occur more often in Austria than in the other countries (Sager et al. 2011, pp. 209, 212, 215, 233–238). Thus, the Austrian regulators sought to ensure that the use of the Cascade rule occurs under controlled conditions. Because supply shortfalls are more exceptional in the other countries, they have tended to differentiate the Cascade rule to allow for some flexibility, rather than rendering it more restrictive. Nonetheless, the issue has low salience in Austria, as it is neither subject to particular discussions nor to resistance from livestock holders. In order to do justice to the solution consistency and coverage scores displayed in Table 4.4, this path has been included in Fig. 4.1. Given its low empirical relevance and for reasons of complexity, I have decided not to include this unique case into the subsequent discussion and theory evaluation.
- 7.
I have omitted two more paths with unique coverage of 0.000 from Table 4.5 (for a justification, see online appendix).
- 8.
Schneider and Wagemann (2012, pp. 295–304) extend this framework by integrating the cases covered by these intersections. First, only cases that have membership in the intersection T*S and also display the outcome Y support the theory. Conversely, cases with ~Y indicate that both the theory and empirical findings predict the outcome which, however, does not materialize. Second, cases in ~T*S that display the outcome Y suggest the direction in which theoretical expectations should be extended. Cases with ~Y, however, weaken this need for theory modification. Third, only cases that display both T*~S and ~Y indicate a delimitation of the theory. Low coverage indicates low empirical importance to delimit the theory. Cases with Y support the theory but weaken the plausibility of the solution. Fourth, if all cases in ~T*~S also have ~Y, then there is no evidence that contradicts both T and S. Conversely, cases with Y indicate that hitherto overlooked explanations for the outcome should be explored.
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Thomann, E. (2019). Customizing Europe: Four Member States Compared. In: Customized Implementation of European Union Food Safety Policy. International Series on Public Policy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92684-1_4
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