Non-compliance with the transposition deadlines of EU directives: the Italian case : explaining transposition of EU directives into Italian legislation

This study departed from a research question: why member states do not respect their obligations deriving from membership in the EU. In this study we have focused on a specific form of non-compliance, the delayed incorporation of European directives into national legal systems, admittedly a decisive prerequisite for the realization of the full EU potential for economic growth and increased competitiveness. The research strategy we pursued to investigate the causes of delayed transposition has been founded on a mixed-method approach. The theoretical framework has been put to test first in a quantitative study and then in a multiple case study analysis. Innovating with respect to previous large-N analyses - which have tended to analyse transposition timeliness from a mere capacity perspective - we test our preference/capacity framework on a newly-gathered data set comprising Italian transposing measures between 1986 and 2004 by means of Event history analysis. The results reveal that our proxy of sector salience in conjunction with selected administrative and political capacity factors significantly affects transposition times. Furthermore, the subsequent case-oriented analysis suggests a scheme integrating preference and capacity factors. ‘Issue salience’ may be seen as a filter that decides which of the two clusters of factors should be deemed more relevant in a transposition process.