The time-dependent effect of conflict in the council on delays in the transposition of EU directives

This article analyses the effect of conflict in the Council of the European Union (EU) on delays in the transposition of EU directives. Based on enforcement and management theories, we predict that conflict in the Council speeds up the transposition process. In addition, we control for the instigation of infringement procedures by the Commission and expect a weaker effect of conflict in cases where the Commission disagrees with a directive and if directives grant more discretion to member states. These hypotheses are tested using two indicators of conflict: heterogeneity and polarization. Cox regression analysis is applied with time-dependent effects and with a shared frailty to control for the multilevel structure of the data. The analyses show that, over time, conflict has an increasing negative effect on delays.