Do great expectations in Brussels fail due to political disagreement in Stockholm? - A study on political contestation and Swedish transposition records

Abstract

Policy processes within the EU are complex and time consuming. Swift responses to ever changing challenges as well as compliance to rules and regulations are crucial for the functioning of the EU. This thesis deals with the obligation of member states (MS) to comply with decisions made at the supranational level. The thesis specifically analyses whether conflict between political actors influence compliance with EU directives in Sweden. This situates the thesis in on-going scholarly debates on reasons for variation in non-compliance between policy sectors. The thesis analyses 56 strategically selected transposition processes, using text analysis to test a series of hypotheses regarding political conflict and compliance. The thesis moreover analyses 15 cases in-depth to try and establish a causal link between political conflict and non-compliance. The analysis furthermore aims to test whether, a well established proxy for political conflict in quantitative studies, the divide between council and commission directives, holds when tested qualitatively. The thesis concludes that council directives do cause a lot more conflict in Sweden than commission directives. Furthermore the thesis finds that political conflict seems to have a substantial effect on compliance in the Swedish context and thus with some certainty in other EU MSs as well. The result corroborates conclusions from previous scholarly work, that political processes in the MSs are an important key for the understanding of compliance variance. However when putting the mechanisms to a test of in depth analysis the thesis fails in establishing a causal link between political conflict and compliance failures.