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.

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This study addresses a central aspect of the micromanagement of the European Parliament, the determinants of rapporteurship allocation. Focusing on the period from 1995 to 1999, I match rapporteurship assignments in the committee on environment with occupational, group membership, ideological and national data. The study asks which of the two distinct features of committees, distributional concern or informational provision, determines rapporteurship selection. My analysis shows that the group of rapporteurs does not mirror the composition of the full plenary. Moreover, the results are consistent with the view that a multifaceted combination of the two concepts of ‘demanding’ and ‘informative’ committees promises a richer explanation of rapporteur assignment than any one of those theories alone.

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The aim of this article is to explain the speed with which Member States transpose EC directives in the maritime sector. By discussing earlier work, the focus is on explanatory factors related to the contents of the directive that needs to be transposed and the context within which national transposition takes place. The authors' expectations have been tested using data across seven Member States and 32 maritime directives. Using survival analysis based on Cox regression, several political‐administrative and legal factors are identified that have an impact on the speed of transposition. The political sensitivity of the directive and the total number of national implementing measures lengthens the duration of transposition, while the degree of specialisation of the directive, the use of package law and experience speed up transposition. The authors also find that the impact of some of these explanatory factors changes over time. This underscores the importance of taking time seriously and to explore time dependency in further theoretical work on explaining policy‐making processes.

This article evaluates member states’ and supranational institutions’ preference patterns in European Union decision-making. We present a research design that encompasses data on the policy profiles of the 15 member states, the Commission, and the European Parliament for 70 European legal acts that were negotiated just before the May 2004 enlargement. We apply principal-component analysis which results in reduction of the different policy issues into a three-dimensional solution. The Commission and the European Parliament are much more favorable toward increased integration than the Council members are. Thus, there appears to be a “north versus south” coalition pattern rather than a “Franco-German axis.” The positions of Ireland and Belgium indicate that the member states’ status as net contributors or net receivers of European Union subsidies are important. Our findings do not support the pro-less integrationist argument nor the left-right dimension that reconciles economic and sociopolitical issues.

In line with the trend of 'agencification' in Western countries, European Union (EU) agencies have been put forward as an instrument expected to improve the way rules are applied in the EU. So far, evidence confirming this expectation is lacking. By assessing the implementation of European transport legislation, this article provides an empirical insight into the role played by two EU agencies -the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). The analysis shows that these EU-level agencies, although created as independent entities to enhance uniform implementation, remain highly dependent on the member states and the Commission. In terms of (legislative) enforcement their contribution has thus been limited. EU agencies such as EMSA and EASA currently seem to add more value by stimulating mutual learning processes among national regulatory authorities.

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