Opting out from European Union legislation: the differentiation of secondary law

Abstract

Differentiated integration in the European Union (EU) has been primarily discussed and analyzed at the treaty level, whereas lack of systematic data has hampered the examination of secondary-law or legislative differentiation. We present a new data set of differentiation in EU legislation from 1958-2012, a descriptive analysis, and a comparison of the patterns of primary and secondary-law differentiation across time, member states, and policies. We find that differentiation facilitating the accession of new members and constitutional differentiation accommodating the opposition against the integration of core state powers drive both primary and secondary law differentiation. In addition, we find complementarity between differentiation in treaty law and secondary legislation depending on the availability and salience of differentiation opportunities.

On the Methodology of Studying Differentiated (Dis)integration: Or How the Potential Outcome Framework Can Contribute to Evaluating the Costs and Benefits of Opting In or Out

“…(). The establishment of the EUDIFF dataset (Duttle et al ., ) has recently allowed a quantitative turn, exemplified by contributions from Duttle (), Winzen () and Winzen and Schimmelfennig (). The focus of these works, again, is largely on the causes of differentiated integration.…”

“…Before the 1990s, differentiated integration was largely taboo in European Community circles (Dahrendorf, 1979), but since then it has become a reality in the EU (Duttle et al, 2017;Leuffen et al, 2013). Today, there is an ongoing debate about whether and under which conditions further differentiation in the EU would be a desirable development.…”

“…Their insightsthat interactions between interdependence and politicization largely shape the horizontal and vertical patterns of differentiationare condensed and further developed in two articles, namely Rittberger et al (2014) and Schimmelfennig et al (2015). The establishment of the EUDIFF dataset (Duttle et al, 2017) has recently allowed a quantitative turn, exemplified by contributions from Duttle (2016), Winzen (2016) and Winzen and Schimmelfennig (2016). The focus of these works, again, is largely on the causes of differentiated integration.…”

Developing Pro-European Environmental and Climate Policy for Ukraine: Institutional Challenges, Appropriate Translation and Legal Compliance Scheme

“…Clearly the implementation of the Association Agreement is the core element of Ukraine's integration into the EU. Although the Agreement is the direct responsibility of public authorities, laid on them by the current legislation in the field of treaty law and other legislative acts, the Agreement itself is applicable legal act, which takes precedence over national law, but not enough to create a reliable and comprehensive legal "framework" of European integration in the Ukrainian legal field [14]. Thus for the legislation approximation in this area and improvement should be based on a number of basic approaches.…”

A two‐tier conception of European Union peoplehood: A realist study of European citizens’ bonds of collectivity

“…61 Unsurprisingly, EU policies are often adjusted to accommodate national circumstances. 62 Further, the EU relies on a 'network of infranational bureaucracies' for its implementation capacity. 63 Moreover, the EU regime does not provide public goods and redistribution, such as healthcare, on a par with national systems.…”