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This essay takes stock of the literature on how European Union policies are being put into practice by the member states. It first provides an overview of the historical evolution of the field. After a relatively late start in the mid-1980s, the field has meanwhile developed into one of the growth industries within EU research. The paper identifies four waves of EU implementation scholarship, each with its own theoretical, empirical and methodological focus. In the second part, the review discusses the most important theoretical, empirical and methodological lessons to be drawn from existing studies. Four conclusions emanate from the analysis of existing EU implementation research. First, the literature has focused heavily on the transposition of EU directives, while comparatively little is known about issues of enforcement and application of both directives and regulations or about member states' reactions to negative integration. Second, scholars studying the transposition of directives seem to agree that we need to address factors that influence member states' willingness and capacities to comply. The main task to be accomplished by future research is to establish under what conditions which configurations of factors prevail, especially with regard to sectoral differences. Third, more energy needs to be devoted to systematic research on the phase of practical implementation, and this research should make more use of theoretical insights from domestic implementation research as well as from management and enforcement approaches. Fourth, quantitative transposition research will have to improve the data it uses to measure the dependent variable. Scholars should explore better data sources and invest more energy in collecting their own data on transposition timing and correctness. Research on application and enforcement, on the other hand, needs to go beyond case studies and instead search for or produce data with which the practical phase of implementation can be analysed on a broader, more comparative scale.

teaching and research staff, visiting professors, graduate students, visiting fellows, and invited participants in seminars, workshops, and conferences. As usual, authors bear full responsibility for the content of their contributions. AbstractStarting from the findings of an earlier compliance study covering the fifteen 'old' member states of the European Union, which identified three 'worlds of compliance', this paper seeks to establish whether or not the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) represent a separate world of compliance. We present empirical findings from a research project on the implementation of three EU Directives from the field of working time and equal treatment in four CEE countries. The evidence suggests that the new member states display implementation styles that are similar to a few countries in the EU15. The expectation that the new member states might behave according to their own specific logic, such as significantly decreasing their compliance efforts after accession in order to take 'revenge' for the strong pressure of conditionality, is not supported by our case studies. Instead, all four new member states appear to fall within a group that could be dubbed the 'world of dead letters'. It is crucial to highlight, however, that this specific 'world of compliance', characterised by politicised transposition processes and systematic application and enforcement problems, also includes two countries from the EU15. ZusammenfassungAusgehend von einer früheren Implementationsstudie über die 15 ‚alten' Mitgliedstaaten der Europäischen Union, deren Hauptergebnis eine Typologie von drei ‚Welten der Rechtsbefolgung' war, geht dieser Beitrag der Frage nach, ob die neuen Mitgliedstaaten aus Mittel-und Osteuropa (MOE) eine zusätzliche Ländergruppierung mit einem eigenen Implementationsstil bilden. Wir präsentieren Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojekts über die Implementation von drei EU-Richtlinien aus den Bereichen Arbeitszeit und Gleichbehandlung in vier MOE-Ländern. Unseren Befunden zufolge ähneln die beobachteten Implementationsmuster der neuen Mitgliedstaaten denen einer kleinen Gruppe von Staaten innerhalb der EU15. Keine Unterstützung liefern unsere empirischen Ergebnisse dagegen für die Erwartung, die neuen Mitgliedstaaten könnten einer eigenen Logik bei der Befolgung von EU-Recht folgen, etwa in Gestalt eines deutlich laxeren Umgangs mit europäischen Rechtsvorschriften nach dem Beitritt als ‚Vergeltung' für den hohen Vorbeitrittsdruck. Insgesamt lassen sich alle vier untersuchten Länder in eine Gruppe einordnen, die wir als ‚Welt des toten Rechts' bezeichnen. Diese Welt, die durch politisierte Umsetzungsprozesse und systematische Probleme bei der praktischen Anwendung und beim Vollzug gekennzeichnet ist, umfasst jedoch nicht nur MOE-Länder, sondern auch zwei ‚alte' Mitgliedstaaten.

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