Appendix: interviews

Interview 1: Subject: MIP; conducted by author on 20/2/2015.

Interview 2: Subject: MIP; conducted by author on 6/3/2015.

Interview 3: Subject: MIP; conducted by author on 12/3/2015.

Interview 4: Subject: MIP; conducted by author on 12/3/2015.

Interview 5: Subject: MIP; conducted by author on 12/3/2015.

Interview 6: Subject: MIP; conducted by author on 13/3/2015.

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Chapter 3: Compliance with Country-Specific

Recommendations under the European

Semester

Abstract: With the adoption of the European Semester, the EU has established a more structured dialogue through which country-specific economic policy recommendations (CSRs) are directed at Member States and their implementation is assessed within a yearly cycle. This is supposed to improve policy coordination and facilitate the attainment of the EU’s economic and social objectives. However, implementation patterns vary across different member states and individual CSRs. Drawing on Commission assessments, this study explores factors contributing to the varied implementation record in its multilevel context. Hypotheses are generated based on existing research on national compliance with EU directives. Results show that whereas stricter surveillance does not systematically affect CSR implementation, government ideology, EU benefits, domestic constraints and state capacities and all matter, though in sometimes unexpected ways. Overall, it appears that while structural factors – particularly corporatism – have an influence, CSR compliance is nevertheless best characterized as a deliberate government choice.

Key words: compliance; economic governance; European Union; European Semester; soft law

3.1 Introduction

With the institutional reforms adopted in the course of the euro crisis, EU coordination of national economic policies has been broadened and deepened. It now takes place in a structured process, the so-called European Semester (ES), which includes a yearly cycle of the development, issuance, and implementation of country-specific recommendations (CSRs). This has led some observers to conclude that EU economic governance is increasingly moving towards an ever more extensive involvement of the EU in and consequently harmonization of national economic policy-making (Dawson 2015). However, the implementation of policy recommendations under the ES is neither straightforward nor merely a technical matter. In October 2016, the president of the Economic and Financial Committee (EFC), Thomas Wieser, noted in a letter (Council of the European Union 2016: 2) that

there is a growing consensus that the real ‘success’ of the European Semester can only be gauged through the actual implementation of the key reforms outlined in the Council's CSRs – and that implementation is somewhat disappointing. The degree of implementation of CSRs varies across countries and policy areas and this despite a considerable streamlining and focus of the CSRs towards the key macroeconomic challenges of each Member State.

This conclusion supports the view that the implementation of (‘soft-law’) recommendations is as multifaceted and contested as that of (‘hard-law’) directives (Saurugger and Terpan 2016). This study is the first to systematically analyze factors affecting the variation in CSR implementation.

Research has only recently taken up the issue of compliance with EU soft law (Saurugger and Terpan 2016; Van Wolleghem 2017). On the one hand, research on EU soft law, ‘new modes of governance’ and recently the ES primarily takes a process-oriented approach and focused on why and how recommendations are generated but only rarely on whether these recommendations are actually implemented (Schäfer 2004; Verdun and Zeitlin 2018). On the other hand, research on EU

compliance overwhelmingly analyzes ‘formal’ compliance and noncompliance in the specific case of EU directives (Treib 2014), though a greater interest in ‘substantive’ compliance is emerging (Zhelyazkova et al. 2017). Against these backdrops, a systematic analysis of compliance with CSRs issued under the ES not only provides an opportunity to better understand the implementation of the increasingly prominent and important EU soft law policy outputs – of which the ES constitutes a prime example. It also promises to generate further insights on compliance as a broader phenomenon in EU politics, which can also be studied in instances where legal obligations and enforcement mechanisms are weaker and more heterogeneous than in the case of directives.