Organizing for Eu Implementation: The Europeanization of Government Ministries in Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia

Abstract

Do different levels of exposure to EU law implementation have consequences for the organization of national ministries? Previous accounts suggest that European integration has little influence on the ‘hardware’ of member state administrations. Data covering the organization of 21 ministries in Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia show the Europeanization effect to be more pronounced than might be expected. Ministries responsible for transposing many EU directives tend to institutionalize centralized oversight in legislative planning, review, and monitoring; ministries with few implementation responsibilities rarely make such adaptations. This effect holds when one controls for the impact of partisan preferences and organizational conventions. The results offer a counterpoint to the studies of old member states that find little EU effect on the organization of domestic ministries.

EUROPEANIZATION OF UKRAINE’S EXECUTIVE POWER (Lessons of the Central and Eastern Europe’s EU Member States)

“…Within this framework, researchers have focused on the EU enlargement negotiations, the reform process, progress on EU legal approximation and implementation of EU policies in the later EU Member States, the consequences of EU enlargement, EU governance, government analysis in the candidate countries and the EU influence on public administration at the national level. Europeanisation of national EU policy coordination mechanisms in the 2004 EU enlargement attracts much attention of researchers [Dimitrova and Toshkov, 2009;Hafner, 2014;Gäther, Hörner and Obholzer, 2011;Kassim, Peters and Wright, 2000;Laffan, 2003;Lippert and Umbach, 2005;Panke, 2010;Rollis, 2014;Ugur, 2013;Zubek and Staronova, 2012], but is not yet systematically studied in the European academic literature. Despite the fact that coordination systems are able to provide technical assistance and strategic expertise to ministries on EU law and to carry out monitoring and "early warning" of the overall level of implementation of EU law in the country, their capacities to promote conflict resolution between different executive powers [Dimitrova and Toshkov, 2009: 3] were not fully studied by the researchers.…”

Coordination for Policy in Transition Countries: Case of Croatia

“…Contemporary societies face the whole range of 'wicked problems' that have to be dealt and solved by joint effort of different organisations, layers of government, and sector areas. Weber and Khademian (2008) define three characteristics of wicked problems: they are unstructured, because they do not exhibit clear cause-effect relationship but show complexity which challenges traditional way of solving problems; they are crosscutting, because they include different elements which relate to different policy areas and actors and cannot be dealt by one department; finally, they are relentless, in the meaning that they can hardly be solved, but their direct or indirect consequences are felt in concentric circles around main problem. Hence, the main goal is to tackle a part of the problem in order to decrease its intensity.…”

“…Dimitrov, Goetz, & Wollmann, 2006), or, if dealing with structures, are concerned based on comparative or single case research of specific policy coordination. Scientific research on coordination is mostly confined in single case studies or two or three countries comparisons of EU accession coordination structures and EU policy coordination, often from the point of the Europeanisation literature (Fink-Hafner, 2007;Gärtner, Hörner, & Obholzer, 2011;Zubek & Staronova, 2012).…”

A Case of Partial Convergence: The Europeanization of Central Government in Central and Eastern Europe

“…Research that moves beyond specialized structures for EU coordination has been less common so far. An important exception is the study by Zubek and Staronova () on the impact of EU exposure on ministerial oversight structures in Estonia, Poland, and Slovakia. Their findings imply a distinction between an inner core and outer circle of EU‐oriented ministries in CEECs, for instance the distinction between highly exposed ministries such as ‘agriculture’ and less exposed ministries such as ‘interior’ in all the countries under study.…”

“…Their emergence and effectiveness have been examined for the pre-accession period (Lippert et al 2001;Zubek 2008). More recently, the adaptation of pre-accession institutional structures to post-accession realities has been subject to investigation, applying conceptual frameworks that were initially developed for the old member states (Dimitrova and Toshkov 2007;Zubek 2011;Batory 2012;Zubek and Staronova 2012).…”