Paper Issues of transposition and interference Table of Contents

Conclusion: Expectations and Further Course of the Research

From the preliminary research we expect the following:

1. 
   Flanders to face a larger transposition and compliance deficit than Scotland;
   

2. 
   Flanders to generally be more likely to face larger misfit than Scotland, though this factor clearly demands case-by-case analysis;
   
3. 
   Political attention to the compliance record of the subnational entities to be high in both cases and the issue salience and political preferences of transposition dossiers to be directive- specific;
   

4. 
   The internal division of competences to be more strongly linked to the occurrence of maltransposition in Flanders than in Scotland;
   
5. 
   Cooperation on and coordination of transposing measures to be more substantial, and institutional jealousy less frequent in Scotland compared to Flanders; and
   

6. 
   Administrative capacity to play a larger role in explaining transposition difficulties in Scotland than in Flanders.
   

Further Course of the Research
This paper fits within a larger research project aiming to explain variation in transposition performance in subnational entities, conducted by the Public Governance Institute (Leuven University). This research project will reveal the transposition performances in five subnational entities, namely Flanders, Wallonia, Scotland, Catalonia and Baden-Württemberg (with the inclusion of a control case: the Netherlands). The conditions laid out in this paper will be tested for their value in explaining the variation in transposition performance between these cases. This research includes transposition as well as compliance deficits.

To keep the research manageable a temporal delineation of five years is set, encompassing all transposition and infringement dossiers figuring in the internal market scoreboards of these subnational entities from May 2010 (November 1^st 2009) thru November 2014 (October 31^st 2014).

Data collection occurs mainly digitally and through interviews with concerned transposing officials. Next to these interviews the main sources for this study are official documents, reports and listings; the directive’s and transposition measures’ texts and timelines, communications throughout infringement procedures and region-specific literature.
Transposition and compliance deficits per subnational entity will be determined statistically through the use of SPSS datasets, compiled on the basis of all gathered pieces of information. As no data are available on the total number of internal market directives the subnational entities were charged with throughout the years since the accession of their central state to the EU, a strict calculation of transposition and compliance deficits is not possible. Instead – being the closest alternative – their success-rates in terms of timeliness and of conformity will be calculated relative to the total number of transposition dossiers they faced per scoreboard. This will be accompanied by calculations of average delays and or correction times, and other relevant descriptives. Comparisons then, should also take into account that the subnational entities – in contrast to the member states – do not have an equal or even necessarily similar amount of EU directives to transpose. To put the subnational
performances in perspective to those of their central state, the member state deficits will be ‘recalculated’ into success-rates equally based on the occurrence per scoreboard of different sorts of maltransposition relative to the total of transposition dossiers in that scoreboard period.
Testing the impact of the conditions set out above demands in depth knowledge on particular transposition dossiers. Therefore, a dozen directives are selected throughout three different yet strongly Europeanized policy sectors, namely environment, agriculture and transport. These policy- domains set out the top three subject matters of all directives with transposition date in the set time period. More importantly, the selected subnational regions have considerable competence in each of these policy domains.