What impact does the negotiation stage prior to the adoption of international agreements have on the subsequent implementation stage? We address this question by examining the linkages between decision making on European Union directives and any subsequent infringements and delays in national transposition. We formulate a preference-based explanation of failures to comply, which focuses on states' incentives to deviate and the amount of discretion granted to states. This is compared with state-based explanations that focus on country-specific characteristics. Infringements are more likely when states disagree with the content of directives and the directives provide them with little discretion. Granting discretion to member states, however, tends to lead to longer delays in transposition. We find no evidence of country-specific effects.

This study describes and explains states' bargaining success in legislative decision-making in the European Union. We measure bargaining success by the congruence between decision outcomes and states' policy positions on a wide range of controversies. We develop and test expectations about variation in states' bargaining success from models of bargaining and legislative procedures. The analyses are based on a newly updated dataset on legislative decision-making that covers the period before and after the 2004 enlargement. The main descriptive finding is that there are no clear winners and losers among member states when a large number of decision outcomes are considered together. However, on any given issue, states typically differ markedly from each other in their bargaining success. Both bargaining models and procedural models provide insights that explain some of the variation in states' bargaining success

We present a new dataset on decision-making in the European Union (DEUII) that revises and expands a previous dataset. Researchers are using this new dataset to address a range of research questions regarding the inputs, processes and outputs of the EU's legislative system. The dataset contains information on 331 controversial issues raised by 125 legislative proposals that were introduced between 1996 and 2008. For each of these controversial issues, the dataset identifies the policy alternative favoured most by each of the main political actors: the European Commission; the European Parliament; and each of the member states' representatives in the Council of Ministers. This information was assembled during 349 semi-structured interviews with key informants. This article describes the dataset and identifies its relevance to several research agendas in EU studies

This research is about the extent to which the policy outcomes in the European Union (EU) decision‐making process represent the policy preferences defended by Member States. Few studies have systematically analysed bargaining satisfaction within the Council. This research uses as a measure of bargaining satisfaction the salient weighted distance between a Member State's policy preference and the decision outcome. This is the first analysis to frame EU Member States' satisfaction using the content of the issues and distinguishing among policy domains. The analysis also includes a substantive number of cases from the post‐2004 enlargement. The empirical analysis shows, in contrast to previous work, that the level of variation of fulfilment in the decision‐making within the Council is considerable across policy domains. The main determinants of bargaining satisfaction are related to both structural and agency factors.