DIFFERING INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION IN THE INFRINGEMENT PROCEDURE?

Abstract

The European Union’s infringement procedure is a multi-stage process through which the European Commission responds to member state violations of EU law. While existing research has identified a range of political and institutional factors that shape the Commission's enforcement decisions, it has primarily treated enforcement as a uniform process without systematically examining whether the same factors operate differently across the stages of the procedure. This thesis addresses this gap by comparing the determinants of the Commission's escalation decisions at two distinct decision points: the escalation from the Letter of Formal Notice to the Reasoned Opinion stage, and from the Reasoned Opinion stage to a referral to the Court of Justice of the European Union. To interpret the findings, the study applies March and Olsen's (1998) framework of the logic of expected consequences and the logic of appropriateness as a theoretical lens, deriving three pairs of competing hypotheses that generate directly contrasting predictions about how variable effects should change across stages. Drawing on a dataset of 15,209 infringement proceedings initiated between 2003 and 2016, two separate logistic regression models are estimated and compared directly. The findings show that EU public support strengthens at the referral stage, consistent with the logic of expected consequences. Commission workload operates as a stable constraint throughout the procedure, consistent with the logic of appropriateness. Member state influence is consistently strong across both stages. The results suggest that the Commission's enforcement behaviour combines strategic selectivity with institutional consistency, and that the relative weight of these two logics shifts depending on the stage of the procedure.