Pincers and Prestige: Explaining the Implementation of EU Gender Equality Legislation
- PDF / 192,548 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 442 x 663 pts Page_size
- 13 Downloads / 218 Views
Pincers and Prestige: Explaining the Implementation of EU Gender Equality Legislation Anna van der Vleuten Department of Political Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen, PO Box 9108, Nijmegen NL-6500 HK, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]
This paper answers the question, under which conditions compliance with a supranational agreement can be obtained in cases in which a member state is unwilling to comply. It shows that the willingness to implement depends on the economic and ideological costs of policy change and on the amount of pressure exercised by societal actors. An unwilling state decides to comply when its prestige is at risk and it is ‘squeezed between pincers’, put under pressure by supranational and domestic actors simultaneously. An analysis of the implementation of EU gender equality policies in France, Germany, and the Netherlands between 1958 and 2000, shows that, depending on their identity, member states valued their prestige and were sensitive to pressure by the European Commission and the European Court. However, when their concern about prestige was not matched by domestic pressure, implementation remained predominantly rhetorical. Therefore, the Commission and the Court actively support political and judicial actors at the transnational and domestic level in order to make the ‘pincers’ work and obtain implementation in spite of high costs. Comparative European Politics (2005) 3, 464–488. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110066 Keywords: compliance; European Union; France; gender equality; Germany; implementation; the Netherlands; prestige
Introduction ‘I don’t think that we would have agreed to this measure if we had known about the implications that it would have to the government now over the Equal Pay Act’, exclaimed the British permanent representative in Brussels, when in 1982 his country was declared guilty of non-compliance with a European directive (Pillinger, 1992, 88).1 Reluctantly, after years of resistance, the British government bowed its head to the European rules. Of course, the governments themselves approve European directives, but, as the British case shows, this does not mean that they are ready to implement them. This raises the question under which conditions compliance with a supranational agreement can be obtained in cases in which a member state is unwilling to
Anna van der Vleuten Pincers and Prestige
465
comply. Europeanization literature points at the role of adaptation pressure, which can be defined as the degree of institutional compatibility between domestic structures and practices and supranational requirements (Haverland, 2000; Knill, 2001). This approach might explain why a state is unwilling to comply, but it cannot explain under which conditions this previously unwilling state changes its behaviour and subsequently decides to comply. In this paper, I argue that the willingness to implement depends on the economic and ideological costs of policy change and on the amount of pressure exercised by societal actors. A state decides to comply against its
Data Loading...
