Europe at the frontline: analysing street-level motivations for the use of European Union migration law

Abstract

This contribution investigates what motivates the use of European Union (EU) law at the street level of migration law implementation. The street level is a crucial venue for EU implementation because lower-level implementers critically influence the level of EU compliance eventually achieved. Employing a bottom-up approach towards implementation, the article combines insights from social psychology and the street-level literature to develop expectations about the relation between individuals' motivations and their use of EU law. The study investigates through qualitative interviews to what extent German migration administrators use EU law in three multilevel decision contexts. The main findings are that uses of EU law vary across contexts and individual implementers. Particularly when national regulatory frameworks are ambiguous, substantive moral norms and instrumental motivations trigger some implementers to rely on EU law. This reliance even has the potential to correct for problematic transposition.

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“…The literature about FLW in multilevel system suggests that these contexts open space for ambiguity and uncertainty during policy implementation, driving local organizations and FLW to take on greater responsibility (Dörrenbächer 2017;Heidbreder 2017;Thomann and Sager 2017). In these settings, FLW adapt policies to embed them in local organizations.…”

Guardians of EU law? Analysing roles and behaviour of Dutch legislative drafters involved in EU compliance

“…A logical next step would be a more deductive approach, preferably using a large-N strategy, to obtain more representative findings. The advantage of such an analysis would be to include other types of civil servants, and to incorporate background variables and theoretically informed variables such as instrumental and normative considerations (Dörrenbächer 2017). Such a study would provide us with more representative insights into the prevalence of conflicting demands in the face of EU law and shed light on the variance and antecedents of EU-related attitudes.…”

“…Yet, given this contribution's focus on the existence of a normative counterweight on political demands during processes of EU compliance, the choice is to focus on the role conceptions revolving around EU legal requirements and national political demands. See Dörrenbächer (2017) for an analysis of civil servants confronted with incompatibilities between EU and national law. 4.…”

Lost in translation: how street-level bureaucrats condition Union solidarity

“…Such unresolved conflicts will continue into the implementation phase (Bardach 1977). In addition, the individual attitude of the caseworker is likely to impact on his/her decisions (Dörrenbächer 2017). In other words, the policy-making process and thus policy design matters to implementation as it carries forward conflicts, ambiguity, discretion and salience.…”

“…The practical and local implementation of European social law has not caught much scholarly attention despite encouragement to do so (Versluis 2007;Thomann and Sager 2017;Mastenbroek 2006). Only very recent research provides a bottom-up approach to EU implementation and highlights the importance of local implementers' role in and individual motivation for turning EU law into a sometimes fragmented practice on ground (Dörrenbächer 2017). Others point out their role in actively containing the influence of the CJEU (Heindlmaier and Blauberger 2017).…”