Measuring and Comparing the Europeanization

of National Legislation

A Research Note

Annette Elisabeth Töller

annette.toeller@uni-erfurt.de

accepted for: Journal of Common Market Studies 10/08

Abstract
The paper starts from the assumption that there is an urgent need for a method to quantitatively measure
the Europeanization of national public policies, meaning the scope and extent in which national policies are
shaped by European law and policy. Research on the Europeanization of public policies has so far mostly
been limited to qualitative analysis. Whereas such case studies, country studies or comparative case or
country studies have produced valuable insights into the nature of Europeanization, the challenge to
measure how much the national policy making has been influenced by European law and policies has not yet
been mastered by the discipline. The result is that myths, such as the 80 per cent-prophecy made by
Jacques Delors, are extremely influential, both in political and in scholarly contexts. After outlining both,
the scholarly and the political context of the debate (1.), the paper briefly discusses different methods
that have been developed so far to measure the Europeanization of national legislation in the UK, the
Netherlands, Denmark, France and Germany (2.). Their common feature is that they aim at measuring
Europeanization – and that they do so by using diverse methods and measures. Not only do they display
some flaws in how they measure the Europeanization of legislation. What is more, the results of theses
diverse studies are by no means comparable. Based on a short discussion of these approaches that have
been developed so far, I will outline how this challenge could be faced (3.). I will then present a concept
for the development of an analytical tool to measure the scope and extent of the Europeanization of
national public policies across policy fields, time and countries (4.), as a means to improve our knowledge
about “what is left for national public policy” (Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 340) by „replacing wild guesses
with precise figures“ (Müller et al. 2009: 2) and as a starting point for explaining variance across policy fields,
across time and, most interesting: across countries. Finally (5.) more and less fundamental objections to
this enterprise are discussed.
Content
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................3
2. Approaches to Measuring the Europeanization of Policies ....................................................................5
2.1 Varieties of Measuring the Europeanization of National Legislation..........................................6
2.2 Comparing the results? ........................................................................................................................9
2.3 Critique of the Methods ....................................................................................................................10
3. On Sources, Mechanisms, and Objects of Europeanization.................................................................11
3.1 Sources and Mechanisms of Europeanization...............................................................................12
3.2 The Object of Europeanization: National Public Policies – or Laws? ......................................14
4. Elements of a Comparative Europeanization-Indicator........................................................................16
4.1. An improved Concept for Measuring the Scope of Europeanization.......................................17
4.2. Measuring the Extent of Europeanization.....................................................................................18
5. Discussion......................................................................................................................................................19

2
1. Introduction1
In 1988, shortly after the Single European Act became effective, Jacques Delors, the former President of
the European Commission, speaking before the European Parliament, made a prophecy: “In ten years 80
per cent of the legislation related to economics, maybe also to taxes and social affairs, will be of
Community origin” (Bulletin No- 2-367/157, July 6 1988). Over the almost 20 years that followed, this
prophecy, meaning a non-scholarly forecasting of a future development, has developed considerable
momentum. Already in the early 1990s when in Germany the Maastricht Treaty was challenged before the
German Constitutional Court, the claimant referred to Delors’ prophecy, turning it into a diagnosis, the
description of a present situation. As we can read in the decision by the German Constitutional Court:
“The claimant, referring to an assessment made by the President of the European Commission, Delors
[…], brings forward that already now almost 80 per cent of all legislation in the field of economic law […]
is determined by Community law” (BVErfGE 89, 155, translation from German by the author). At the
same time in France, the Conseil d’ État reacted to Delor’s prophecy when considering the question how
far French law was already penetrated by European law (Conseil d’État 1993: 42-48).
In Autumn 2004, the Netherlands experienced a heated public debate after the Secretary of the State for
European Affairs, Atzo Nicolai, had stated that 60 per cent of all laws and regulations that are in effect in
the Netherlands have their origin in Brussels (e.g. NRC Handelsblad October 1-6 2004). Later on
commentators suggested that the share of Europeanized Dutch legislation was between 70 and 80 per
cent (Bovens and Yesilkagit 2009: 7). Similar figures were discussed for Austria (Müller and Jenny 2009:
2). In early 2007, the former German President Herzog asserted in a newspaper article dealing with the
Constitutional Treaty in particular and the state of Europe in general that 84 per cent of all laws and
regulations that apply in Germany come from Brussels, whereas only 16 per cent originate from Berlin
(Herzog and Gerken 2007).2
Certainly one can argue that the “80 per cent myth” as some commentators call the Delors-prophecy and
its reception is just the story of a misinterpreted figure, as there are many. However, I want to argue that
behind the obviously misinterpreted figure there is a scholarly problem that political science should be
able to deal with. I want to put forward five reasons to support this claim:

1 I received extremely valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Jørgen Grønnegaard Christensen,
Herwig C.H. Hofmann, Rainer Prätorius, Susanne K. Schmidt, Katrin Toens, Christian Toft, and Kai-Uwe
Schnapp and benefited greatly from continuous co-operation on the issue with Dieter Plehwe and Susanne Uhl.
I also learned a lot from my students at HSU where I gave a research seminar on “Measuring Europeanization”.
Finally the paper also benefited a lot from discussions I had with Andy Moravcsik when co-authoring a
newspaper-article on this issue (see http://ftd.de/meinung/kommentare/160317.html). As always, the
remaining flaws and errors are in the sole responsibility of the author.
2 The background of these figures demonstrates the politically sensitive nature of the issue: Herzog and Gerken
refer to a “study” by the Ministry of Justice. The Ministry, however denies to have undertaken a study in this
field. They did, however, respond to a parliamentary query in April 2005 asking for the number of Federal
German and European laws that were passed from 1998 to 2004. The Ministry duly answered that in this period
18.167 regulations and 750 directives were passed on the European level whereas on the German federal level
1195 laws (primary legislation) and 3055 regulations (secondary legislation) were adopted (BT-Drs. 15/5434: 15).
3
1. In the political discussions mentioned (and there are many more in the specific national contexts)
far reaching diagnoses and claims are derived from the allegedly secured figures. In the Dutch debate it
was, among other things, stated that “Europe stipulates the Dutch legislation to a large extent and
therefore the European Union has the traits of a superstate” (Volkskrant 2006, cited in: Asser Institute
2007: 10). In the German discussion, based on the finding of a “creeping and inadequate centralization”
no less than the question “whether Germany can any longer be called a parliamentary democracy without
restriction” (Herzog and Gerken 2007, translation by the author) is at stake. Whereas proponents of
European integration use high levels of Europeanization in order to emphasize the relevance of Europe in
general, opponents of Europe use such data in order to depict Europe as a kind of an inexorable
Leviathan that fundamentally threatens the democratic integrity of the nation state (Müller et al. 2009: 16).
Even if we tend to qualify this kind of statements as populism, my point is that political science should be
able to rationalize such a debate, e.g. by measuring the actual degree of Europeanization, by identifying
major trends and by verifying if there is or is not something like continuing centralization.

2. The 80 per cent myth is not only a major point of reference in the political debate, but also
authoritative books in European Union Studies (e.g. Hix 1999: 3; Wallace et al. 2005: 3) cite the figure as if
it was a proven fact, even though some argue in the same breath, that “whether or not the percentage is
precisely accurate does not matter“ (Wallace et al. 2005: 3). Thus „replacing wild guesses with precise
figures“ (Müller et al. 2009: 2) should be an aim in itself.

3. Democracy as a form of mediated self-governance in which Parliaments still ought to play a

certain role requires that we know who is governed by whom. In a complex “multi-level-system” this
implies to know “what is left for national public policy” (Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 340; see Moravcsik
2002). This is why this question is often discussed in the context of the role that is left for national
Parliaments in European decision-making (e.g. Töller 2006; O’Brennan and Raunio 2007: 5; Brouard et al.
2007: 9).

4. European integration and Globalization are considered to be the major driving forces of a
“transformation of the state” (Sørensen 2004; Hurrelmann et al. 2007). There is consensus that the
European Union, mainly based on the competence that member states have delegated to it over the years,
has extended its mainly law-making activities into more and more policy fields and also into highly
sensitive areas (Pollack 2005). In this context the questions how much national autonomy is left (see e.g.
Kassim and Menon 1996; Uhl 2006) and which patterns of multilevel governance have emerged are
relevant in order to characterize the nature of this transformation of the nation state.

5. Fifth and finally, qualitative studies have shown that with regard to the remaining scope for
autonomous national action, there is considerable variance across policy fields, across time, and
particularly across different member states (e.g. Börzel 2005: 50). Yet, case studies are naturally restricted
to a very limited number of rather specific cases (Vink and Graziano 2007: 176). Thus applying
quantitative approaches allows for increasing the number of observations and makes us hope for more
generalization (Franchino 2005: 251; Christensen 2009a: 4). We will not be surprised by variance across

4
policy fields, due to the tremendous differences with regard to the extent of community competence
(communitarization), yet we might like to test a number of hypotheses on which policy fields are or are
not strongly Europeanized. Comparisons across time will show increasing “Europeanization” until the late
1990s. If this is, however, a still continuing tendency or if maybe with decreasing numbers of European
legal acts national autonomy has been “recovering” during the last six or seven years is one of the open
questions we should be able to answer. An equally fascinating aspect is that in spite of identical or yet
similar institutional and legal constraints, member states differ in the degree to which they shape their own
policies, as e.g. Schmidt (2008), Menz (2003) and others have shown. This is where classical questions and
answers of comparative public policy come in: Why variance? What role do institutions, parties etc. play
for the explanation of the differences? (e.g. Castles 1982).

Thus, it is my claim that for all these reasons, and maybe also because we just “want to know it”, we need
an instrument to measure and compare the Europeanization of public policy, defined as the extent to
which European law and policy shapes national decisions on public policies, across policy fields, across
time and across countries.

I will proceed as follows: In a first step (2.) I will present some methods to measure the Europeanization
of policies that so far have been developed in the context of several Member States of the European
Union and I will discuss their merits and demerits. In a second step (3.) I will analyse what we need to
consider when we want to improve our methods. Then (4.), I will present first, a clear concept for an
indicator measuring the scope of Europeanization across time, policy fields and countries, and second
some ideas for a complementary indicator measuring the extent of Europeanization.3 Finally (5.) I will
discuss criticism that is naturally provoked by such a project.

2. Approaches to Measuring the Europeanization of Policies

Analyses that have so far dealt with measuring4 the Europeanization of public policies can be
distinguished according to their understanding of Europeanization5. Authors that understand
Europeanization as the transfer of decision-making competences to the European level consequentially
address and quantify the distribution of competences across the multi-level-system when they, following
Philippe Schmitter (1996) and the early work by Lindberg and Scheingold (1970), deal with “the
Europeanization of public tasks” (Schmidt 2005) or the “depth and breadth of the Europeanization of

3 Thinking about how to measure the Europeanization of public policies would be impossible without the
valuable results of so many qualitative studies in this field. This paper cannot cover the whole range of studies
that have been presented but rather randomly mentions those that illustrate aspects that are of relevance for the
quantitative approach. Most recently see the volume edited by Graziano and Vink (2007).
4 Contributions that do not aim at analysing Europeanization in quantitative terms use the term “measuring
Europeanization” in the context of the methodological challenge to establish the causal link between a domestic
change an “the European factor” (e.g. Vink and Graziano 2007: 15-17).
5 Europeanization, as has been criticized by many authors, has been used in the debate in various different
definitions (Bulmer and Radaelli 2005). Since I agree with a majority of authors that argue that Europeanization
would have to mean something different than European integration, I restrict Europeanization to the impact of
European law and policies at the national level, in our case on national policy-making and policy substance .
5
policies” (Börzel 2006: 495). Even though these analyses are highly interesting and give some hint as to
the more or less integrated policy fields, in the end they do not prove to be useful for our objective, first
because the distribution of competences does not tell us much about how these competences are used on
either level and second because they give no clue what kind of effect this distribution of competences has
on the national level.

2.1 Varieties of Measuring the Europeanization of National Legislation

Authors that understand Europeanization as the impact of European law and policies on the national
policy basically focus on the influence of European law on national law. There are basically five such
studies which I want to present and then briefly discuss. These are the studies that Page presented for the
UK (Page 1998), Bovens and Yesilkagit presented for the Netherlands (Bovens and Yesilkagit 2004, 2009)
and, very similarly, Blom-Hansen and Christensen presented for Denmark (Blom-Hansen and Christensen
2004, Christensen 2009), a recent study that Brouard, Costa and Kerrouche presented for France (Brouard
et al. 2007), and my own study on Germany (Töller 2008).

The Europeanization of Statutory Instruments in the UK

For the UK, Edward Page presented a study in 1998, that aimed at “assessing the scope of the impact of
EU legislation on British public policy” (Page 1998: 808). More precisely he measured the share of
Statutory Instruments (SIs, instruments of secondary legislation) that transposed a European directive into
national law. Among the 11.781 SIs that were passed between 1987 and 1997 and included in the study6,
15.5 per cent were “Europeanized”, with the portfolios agriculture and trade and industry among the
highest scores of Europeanization (51.1 per cent for agriculture and 28.6 per cent in trade and industry).7
Page analyses the figures for each year and thus also includes the time dimension: Whereas until 1991 the
share of europeanized SIs is only about 12 per cent, in 1992 it increases to a level of appr. 19 per cent, and
in 1997 drops again to 8 per cent, a number which Page, too, finds difficult to explain.

The reason for Page to focus on secondary legislation and not on parliamentary acts is the simple but
interesting fact that in the UK about 92 per cent of all European directives are transposed into national
law by statutory instruments (Page 1998: 804).

6 All in all between 1987 and 1997 almost 30.000 SIs were passed, but for a number of obviously good reasons,
they were not all included in the study, e.g. because they were of local nature or there was no sufficient
information available (Page 1998: 805).
7 The fact that the Northern Ireland-Office, the Scottish Office and the Welsh Office have relatively high shares
of SIs implementing European directives is because these rules mostly relate to agricultural issues (Page 1998:
806). The high share of “europeanized” SIs in the field of defence are due to the transposition of rules on the
transport of hazardous substances and do not reflect a high degree of Europeanization of British defence policy
(Page 1998: 806). On the other hand, the relatively low level of europeanized legislation in environmental policy
does not reflect a low impact of European policy, but is rather due to the fact that European impacts are
“dwarfed” by the high number of national measures (Page 1998: 807).
6
The Europeanization of legal acts in the Netherlands and Denmark
The studies for Denmark and the Netherlands measure the share of legal acts (primary and secondary
legislation) that transposed a European directive into national law. Yet, both studies do not focus on the
figures of laws passed each year, but on the aggregated numbers of all legislation that was valid by mid
2003. Bovens and Yesilkagit find out that in the Netherlands the share of primary and secondary law that
serve to implement a directive is 12.6 per cent (Bovens and Yesilkagit 2009). The authors relate their
figures for single portfolios to the figures brought about by Blom-Hansen and Christensen who, with the
same approach, analysed the Europeanization of Danish legislation. According to the Danish study, 14 per
cent of all (primary and secondary) legislation serves to implement a European directive (Christensen
2009b: 9). Both Countries have relatively high values of Europeanization in the field of agriculture,
economic affairs, transport and environment. However, other portfolios display major differences in the
degree of Europeanization.8

The Europeanization of French Lawmaking

In a paper written in 2007, Brouard, Costa and Kerrouche analyse the “Europeanization of French laws
1986-2006” (Brouard et al. 2007: 16). The authors see Europeanization as the “implementation of a
binding European decision at the national level” (Brouard et al. 2007: 17). Thus with their operationali-
zation, Europeanized laws are laws that either ratify international treaties (nearly half of the cases),
directives that demand national transposition, agreements between Member States or judicial decisions by
the European Court of Justice (Brouard et al. 2007: 19). Thus they apply a wider operationalization than
the studies discussed before by including more than the implementation of directives, but they deliberately
exclude all kinds of indirect or non-compulsory effects (Brouard et al. 2007: 17).

Based on the laws adopted in each year and the aggregated number of laws, the authors measured the
shares of all French laws that have been Europeanized. Accordingly, across time, the yearly share of
Europeanized laws increased from less then 3 per cent in 1986 with a first peak of 19 per cent in 1994 and
a second peak of 27 per cent in 1997. Afterwards, the share of Europeanized laws decreased, to an
extremely low share in 2002 (5 per cent) and 13.3 per cent in 2006. As to the aggregated laws, the share of
all laws that have been Europeanized increased from 2.5 per cent in 1986 to 13.3 per cent in 2006: There
were 245 Europeanized laws out of 1848 (Brouard et al. 2007: 20).

Looking at the several portfolios, the study finds the highest shares of Europeanized legislation in the
fields of “space, science and technology” (39 per cent) and banking, finance and domestic commerce (28
per cent). Lower rates can be found in the field of agriculture (24 per cent), energy (20 per cent),
immigration (20 per cent) and environment (16 per cent), immigration (20 per cent; Brouard et al. 2007:
21).

8 There is also an excellent study on Austria by Müller and Jenny (2009) which is not separately discussed here
because it is similar to the studies on the Netherlands and Denmark.
7
The authors conclude that among the domestic policy issues “for the last 21 years, European Union
norms have dictated a significant but limited part of changes in the French laws in nearly one third of the
domestic policy spectrum in France. Even in the most Europeanized policy field, the main part of the laws
voted by the French Parliament are not the implementation of EU decisions” (Brouard et al. 2007: 22). As
do other authors, Brouard, Costa and Kerrouche with their data explicitly challenge the 80-per cent-pro-
phecy by Jacques Delors (Brouard et al. 2007: 22) and also other studies that for France state a share of 60
to 70 per cent of French laws induced by the EU (Maïa 2005).

The Europeanization of German Legislation

My own method identifies the European impact on German federal legislation.9 The analysis is based on
the data-base of German federal legislation GESTA and identifies the share of Federal legislation that has
been influenced by a “European impulse” (Töller 2008). It is based on the analysis of laws passed in each
election period from 1983 to 2005 and thus allows for the analysis across time and across portfolios.

“European impulse” is a category that was introduced by those who organize the data-base. It generally
includes a broad variety of “impulses” and, for the aim of the analysis was “cleaned” from non-EU-
impulses (e.g. measures stemming from the European Council etc.). It allows for a broader
operationalization of Europeanization than just counting the number of measures that transpose
directives but has a different approach than the French study. To exemplify what is labelled by the
“European impulse” I would like to explain the different measures covered by this category in the 15th
election period (2002-2005): More than half of the 111 “European impulses” identified (52.3 per cent)
were directives that had to be transposed into national law, 22.5 per cent were regulations that national law
had to be adapted to, 7.2 per cent were Council Decisions (including framework-decisions in the field of
Police and Judicial co-operation), 3.6 per cent referred to decisions by the European Court of Justice, 3,6
per cent referred to stipulations in the Treaty and 9.9 per cent were “miscellaneous”.

The analysis identifies an overall continuous increase in the “Europeanization” of German legislation.
Between 2002 and 2005, almost 40 per cent of all domestic laws were influenced by a “European
impulse”. Shares were highest in environmental policy (81.3 per cent) and agriculture (75 per cent). We
can find medium values around 40 per cent not only in the fields of economics and transport (in which we
might have expected this), but also in the fields of justice (42.2 per cent), finance (42.6 per cent) and
family and health (42.3 per cent).

If we look at the development in the different portfolios over 22 years, none of the fields displays a
continuous increase of legislation influenced by a European impulse. Basically we can distinguish two
different courses: In some portfolios, the share of Europeanized laws across time displayed either
fluctuation (transport) or increase, with a further increase between the 14th (1998-2002) and the 15th (2002-
2005) election period. This applies for the field of justice, finance, family and health, transport and
environment. In other portfolios we can identify an overall increase of Europeanized laws across time, but

9 This method was first applied in the mid-1990ies (see Töller 1995: 47).
8
between the 14th and 15th election period, the share of Europeanized laws declined. This is the case in the
field of home affairs, economics, agriculture and work and welfare.10 Yet, for deciding whether this
indicates a trend reversal from increasing to decreasing shares of Europeanized laws, we need to wait for
the data of the 16th election period (2005-2009).11

2.2 Comparing the results?

To sum up, the various studies that were presented come up with rather different shares of Europeanized
laws. Page’s study on the UK, looking at the cross-time development of the share of Statutory
Instruments that implement a directive, identified shares between 8 and 19 per cent for the 1990s. For
2003, Blom-Hansen and Christensen, identifying the share of the law (primary and secondary) valid in
2003 that implement directives saw 14 per cent of Danish laws Europeanized whereas Bovens and
Yesilkagit, taking the same approach, for the Netherlands identified that 12.6 per cent of Dutch legal acts
were Europeanized. Analysing the Europeanization of French domestic laws passed from 1986 to 2006,
Brouard, Costa and Kerrouche identify an overall share of 13.3 per cent of Europeanized laws. My own
analysis, focusing on the development of the share of legislation that have been influenced by a
“European impulse” across time, displays that for the period from 2002 to 2005 almost 40 per cent of
German federal legislation were Europeanized – the relatively high share is a result of a rather broad
operationalization of Europeanization. There are more such data around. E.g. for Finland, Wiberg found
out that between 1995 and 2003 12 per cent of the laws passed by the Eduskunta contained a reference to
EU law (Wiberg 2004). Müller and Jenny find for Austria that 10.6 per cent of Austrian laws and 14,1 per
cent of regulations valid in 2003 served to implement European directives (Müller and Jenny 2009: 27).

If we reflect on these data, two things become clear: Even though the rather low shares of Europeanized
legislation in most studies are at least in part the result of a rather narrow operationalization of
Europeanization as the transposition of directives, overall shares of 80 per cent or more Europeanized
legislation cannot be supported by empirical evidence. Second, what these data have in common beside
the fact that they reflect ways to measure the “Europeanization” of national policies is that they all
measure different things and thus are by no means comparable.

There are basically two reasons for this: First, all methods focus on portfolios which are politically
defined, vary over time and particularly across countries. Consequently, since what is covered e.g. by
“economics” in the Netherlands could differ considerably from what is labelled this way in Germany or
France, data collected on this base are generally not comparable. Thus, what we see in the Danish and the
Dutch studies is not cross national variance in the Europeanization of public policies (or: differences in

10 See also the study by Felder that analyzes to what extent national ministries (federal and Länder level) deal with
European affairs (among other things). Accordingly, those ministries that have the highest shares of departments
dealing with European affairs are ministry for the environment (96,7%), the ministry for food and agriculture
(93,6%), the ministry of economics (91,2%) and the ministry of health (83,3%) (Felder 2007).
11 For a more detailed discussion of these data see Töller 2008.
9
the preserved national autonomy with regard to the shaping of policies), but just a collection of figures
that cannot be compared because the portfolios cover different things.

The second reason why these data are not comparable at all is simply that they measure totally different
things. First, they analyse different units of legislation (only primary, only secondary or both, primary and
secondary). Second, they relate these different units of legislation to different time units (years or election
periods on the one hand and aggregate quantity of valid legislation at a certain point on the other or both,
in the French case). And third, they operationalize Europeanization in different ways, with most studies
restricting Europeanization to the transposition of European directives into national law whereas two
studies work with a broader operationalization.

Since these different methods produce wholly incomparable results, what we need for comparative
analysis is a method that measures the same things in all countries – an undertaking which definitely
sounds much easier than it is. Before going one step further in developing such a method, I would like to
discuss the pros and cons of the different methods.

2.3 Critique of the Methods

The clear advantage of the analyses by Bovens and Yesilkagit and their Danish colleagues Blom-Hansen
and Christensen is that they include primary and secondary legislation. In many countries, a wide share of
transposing directives is done by secondary legislation (see below). As Bovens and Yesilkagit and also
König and Mäder show, the balance between primary and secondary legislation in transposing directives
does not only differ between countries12, but within one country it may also vary between portfolios. Thus
also Page’s approach to focus on SIs makes sense when analysing the UK only, but from a comparative
perspective, we might like to see data for primary legislation, too. This is problematic about my own
approach, since Rechtsverordnungen (secondary legislation) are not included in the GESTA-Database and
thus not in my analysis. The same criticism applies to the French study while the problem here is more
severe since as a consequence of constitutional stipulations, more transposition is done by executive law-
making (König 2007: 422-433).

As already mentioned above, portfolios are politically defined, vary over time and particularly across
countries. What is more, even when analysing only one country, categorizing measures according to
portfolios is not necessarily meaningful in terms of either public policies or their Europeanization because
they are either to broad or too narrow to represent a coherent policy field. One case in point is the
portfolio “finance” in German legislation. Under this label, 47 laws were passed between 2002 and 2005.
These fall, however, into (at least) three policy categories: taxes (16, with 7 European impulses, 43 per
cent), finance services (10, with 8 European impulses, 80 per cent), budget (8, with no European
impulses), and others (13, with 5 European impulses, 48,5 per cent).13

12 See Epstein and O’Halloran 1999.

13 On the problems of the European typology of policy-fields see Plehwe 2008.
10
A fundamental criticism that applies to all five studies is that they do not cover directly binding regulations
which usually cannot be traced when looking at national law, but in a way by-pass national law (see
below). However, European regulations form a major (yet varying and all in all declining) part of policy-
shaping rules (Christensen 2009a). Not only does the exclusion of regulation produce inadequately low
values of Europeanization. Due to the fact that directives and regulations are used differently in different
policy fields (e.g. agriculture is dominated by regulations whereas environmental policy is dominated by
directives), including directives and excluding regulations will bias results between different policy fields.
Thus any serious method for measuring the Europeanization of legislation would have to include both,
directives and regulations.

What I see as an advantage of my own, and in part the approach by Brouard, Costa and Kerrouche is in
turn the disadvantage of the other approaches: To measure only the share of national legislation that
transposes European directives into national law is not only a fairly narrow operationalization of
Europeanization. It also implies a risk that is very present in qualitative Europeanization studies, too: to
equate Europeanization with the transposition of directives and thus, first to find Europeanization where
one searches for it and second to neglect all kind of more contingent or even idiosyncratic forms of
Europeanization (Töller 2004; Schmidt 2008). In turn, e.g. the category of the “European impulse” is
broader and allows for considering all kinds of (possibly unexpected) sources of Europeanization.

Also, criticism applies to those approaches that analyse the aggregated number of passed legislation at a
certain point of time only. This approach prevents us from identifying developments over time which –
given the questionable diagnoses of an ongoing centralization – is one of the interests that we pursue with
this kind of investigation.

All in all, the presented approaches allow for an interesting analysis of the Europeanization of specific
aspects of particular sets of national rules. Yet, all of them allow for a rather limited evaluation of the
Europeanization of public policies and fail to cover the whole range of sources of Europeanization
(especially regulations). What is more and most problematic, they do not produce results that are
comparable in any way.

3. On Sources, Mechanisms, and Objects of Europeanization

After having discussed the shortcomings of present approaches I want to systematize these findings and
ask what we have to account for when we want to make it better. For doing so I will distinguish sources,
mechanisms, and objects of Europeanization (see also Christensen 2009a: 3).

11
3.1 Sources and Mechanisms of Europeanization
The European Union is a “regulatory state” in as far as it reaches its policy objectives predominantly by
law (Majone 1996; Pollack 2005).14 Yet, as I argued before, when we identify sources of Europeanization,
we should definitely include more “things that come from Brussels” than just directives (Saurugger and
Radaelli 2008: 211). However, different “things”, let us call them sources of Europeanization, have
different ways to impact on national policies. I will discuss the relevant sources in conjunction with the
mechanisms they are likely to activate.

Regulations are directly applicable in the member states, need no national law to become effective but enjoy
primacy over contradictory national law. Even though regulations are the “hardest” instrument of
European legislation, they have only rarely been addressed by Europeanization studies (Plehwe 2008).
Decisions by the Council or Commission have a similar character but are usually (yet not always) addressed
to single countries or persons. Decisions by the Court of Justice relate to single cases, but, due to the logic of
case law, have often had a quasi-legislative character by setting rules and standards in policy fields (e.g. for
the field of competition policy: Wilks 2005: 129, for tax policy: Uhl 2006: 573, on a general note: Müller et
al. 2009: 17). All these measures require the implementation and adaptation in a pretty straightforward
way. The opening of the German armed forces for women in 2001 as a consequence of a decision taken
by the Court in 2000 demonstrate the possible extent of Europeanization (C-285/98, January 11 2000).

Directives prescribe objectives for the member states but leave room for the national measures that are to
realize these objectives.15 As qualitative studies have demonstrated, the extent of change brought about on
the national level does not only depend on the “goodness of fit” or “misfit” between European and
national policy (Risse et al. 2001; Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 347), but also on factors such as party politics
or position and power of organized interests (e.g. Falkner et al. 2002; Menz 2003) or the significance of a
policy area for a member state (Méndez et al. 2008).16 According to the decisions by the European Court
of Justice, directives may under certain circumstances become applicable – and thus have policy-effects –
even before they are transposed into national law.17 However, already long before directives are passed
and demand for national law to be adopted accordingly, they limit national policy-shaping autonomy. As

14 European law, in contrast to (other sorts of) international law enjoys autonomy, direct effect and primacy face to
contradictory national law. These legal principles have been developed by the European Court of Justice over
the years and made the European Community become a “Community of Law” (see Weiler 1991).
15 It should be subject to closer analysis under what conditions directives do or do not allow for continuing
national heterogeneity.
16 It is striking that many qualitative Europeanization studies restrict Europeanization to the implementation of
directives (e.g. Jordan and Liefferink) an thus display a problematic bias in favour of compliance while effects
“beyond compliance” are not taken into consideration (see Töller 2004, Schmidt 2008, Saurugger/Radaelli 2008:
213).
17 See e.g. C-129/96 Inter-Environnement Wallonie [1997] and C-144/04 Mangold v. Helm [2005].
12
soon as the Commission officially proposes a measure, member states are subject to a stand-still provision
according to which in this field no national measure may be passed.18

Whereas the effects of such “positive integration” has been the subject of a vast number of research
projects, negative integration is the under-researched stepchild of qualitative Europeanization research
(Schmidt 2008). Negative integration, i.e. the norm that no national measure may be passed that restricts the
internal market (i.e. the free circulation of goods, services, capital and labour) and the free competition
within the internal market, is usually transported via judicial policy making (Schmidt 2008: 298). It not
only brings about Europeanization by changing national opportunity structures (Knill and Lehmkuhl
2002) but also by simply impeding national measures from being passed (i.e. by producing “non-
decisions”, see Bachrach and Baratz 1962) or by making member states change the content of originally
planned measures (e.g. for the field of environmental policies: Kraemer 1995: 118-127). Whereas the basic
assumption was that negative integration leads to regulatory competition between the member states,
recent studies have shown that this is not necessarily the case. Rather, legal uncertainty can prevail to
which member states can react in totally different ways (Schmidt 2008).

We also have to consider negotiations in the shadow of decision-making competences as a relevant source of
Europeanization. E.g. in the field of state aid policy, where the Commission has far reaching competences
to prohibit certain kinds of activities, it negotiates with the member state rather than adopting formal
decisions. A striking example is the case of state guarantees for German Länder public banks where a
profound policy adaptation occurred as a consequence of many years of negotiation over the issue.19

Even though intergovernmental policies, such as Cooperation in Police and Judicial Co-operation, lack the
typical character of European law and are thus less coercive, they can also bring about processes of
learning and adaptation, as e.g. Mörth shows for the field of defence equipment policy (Mörth 2003;
Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 345).

Finally, we have a broad range of legally non binding measures, which nonetheless can be relevant sources
of Europeanization (Radaelli 2008). It makes sense to distinguish those measures that are adopted (mostly
by the Commission) in the context of existing Community competences in the form of soft law, which
although not legally binding is usually followed by the member states or individuals (e.g. Senden 2004)20
from those in fields where there are no community competences and “soft” coordination methods, such

18 There is a legal stipulation with regard to product related rules in the so-called information directive (O.J. 1998
No. L 204/37). Whereas lawyers discuss if there is a general legal obligation of Member states not to legislate as
soon as the Commission has initiated European legislation, Member states at least feel politically detained to do
so.
19 See Grossmann 2006 on the bank case and Schmidt et al. 2007: 17-20 more generally on the Europeanization
effects of European state aid policy.
20 On the Europeanization effects of such soft law in the field of state aid policy see e.g. Schmidt 2008.
13
as the OMC, are applied (e.g. López-Santana 2006). Here the mechanisms of Europeanization range from
policy-learning21 to deliberate adaptation of policies (Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 349; Radaelli 2008).

Now, if we look at the real interplay between sources and mechanisms of Europeanization in the policy
fields, things become complicated, for at least four reasons:

First, the mentioned sources of Europeanization are ideal types which in reality can occur as a mixture.
For instance, the so-called Bologna-Process is a striking example how a combination of intergovernmental
cooperation and OMC brought about nothing less than a tremendous transformation of the European
Universities.

Second, in each policy field, there are different mechanisms at work (Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 355). For
instance, in the field of Italian regional policy Bull and Baudner have shown that Europeanization was
brought about by a combination of first adaptation pressure stemming from the internal market program
and then learning processes induced by European regional policy (Bull and Baudner 2004). Uhl shows for
the field of tax policy that there are elements of adaptation to tax harmonization and of tax competition at
work (2006). Töller has shown for German environmental policy that negative integration and the
standstill obligations resulting from the making of positive integration produced legal uncertainty to which
the Federal Government reacted by evading to non-legislative forms of rule-making (Töller 2007).

This brings us to the third point: each national policy field is not only affected by the respective European
policy field, but also by other policies. Just to take an example: national transport policies, as Plehwe
shows, are influenced not only by European transport policy, but also by industrial policy, by
environmental policy, by internal market policy, and by competition policy (Plehwe 2008). The field of
finance services has strongly been influenced by European state aid policy (Grossman 2006) as have
regional aid policies (Méndez 2008), or more recently the local provision of formerly “public” services.

Finally, to establish a causal link when analysing the interplay between sources and mechanisms of
Europeanization is of course the more difficult, the “softer” the legal quality of the source of
Europeanization is (see also Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 352; Vink and Graziano 2007: 10).

Yet, the whole project depends on the availability of comparable data. As preferable as a wide
operationalization as we can see e.g. in the German data base with the European impulse might be – we
do not have such data in other countries and thus have to restrict ourselves (at least for the first part of
the measurement (4.1), to identifiable European impulses.

3.2 The Object of Europeanization: National Public Policies – or Laws?

What is more, identifying the relevant unit of analysis on the national level is less straight forward than it
appears at first glance.

21 Learning as a mechanism of Europeanization can of course occur as a consequence of all other sources of
Europeanization, too (e.g. Bulmer and Radaelli 2005: 343).
14
First, if we finally look at the object of Europeanization, namely the national policies, the whole project of
measuring the Europeanization of national public policies is based on two core assumptions that do not
apply under all circumstances. One assumption is that laws are at least the backbone of public policies,
and the second assumption is that Europeanization effects materialize in national laws. Yet, both
assumptions do not apply to all policy fields to the same extent. The assumption that laws are the
backbone of public policies particularly does not apply to foreign and defence policy which simply are not
shaped by laws to a relevant degree. Second, there are policy fields in which Europeanization effects do
not materialize in national laws. This might be the case because Europeanization occurs in a broader
political context and not by traceable legal acts (e.g. the impact of the stability and growth pact on national
budgets is beyond any doubt but cannot be identified in national budget laws, e.g. Meyer 2004) or because
the Community disposes of far reaching competences including implementing powers of its own, such as
in competition policy (Wilks 2005). In both cases Europeanization cannot be “traced” in national laws
(see e.g. for state aid policy Méndez et al . 2008). Thus, we have to restrict the analysis to policy fields to
which two conditions apply: that policies on the national level are shaped by laws to a relevant extent and
that Europeanization materializes and thus can be traced in such national laws.

Second, when developing an approach for comparative analysis, we need to understand the logic of legal
sources in the respective member states, particularly with regard to primary and secondary legislation
(Epstein and O’Halloran 1999; Huber and Shipan 2002).22 Clearly, primary legislation is not the only field
in which we have to look for Europeanization. As mentioned before, many member states transpose the
majority of directives by secondary legislation (König 2007).23 Beyond including primary and secondary
legislation, in some member states also quasi-corporatist agreements between the state and societal groups
or decrees issued by trade associations can serve to implement directives24 (Bovens and Yesilkagit 2004:
14-15).25 More fundamental is that we have to include the European regulations that are directly applicable

22 Differences can be exemplified by the different constitutional settings in France and Germany. Whereas in the
German Grundgesetz several stipulations (Art. 80 I in particular and the theory of essentiality of the German
Federal Constitutional Court) limit the possibilities for delegated legislation to cases in which there is a legislative
act entailing a clear cut delegating norm needs to state content, objective and extent of the delegation, whereas in
France, there is original legislative competence with the government whereas the Assemblée National can
legislate only in those fields hat are explicitly mentioned in Art. 34 of the Constitution.
23 E.g. in the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark roughly about 90 per cent of all directives are translated into
national law by secondary legislation (Page 1998: 804; Bovens and Yesilkagit 2009: 11). In Austria, Germany and
Finland, the share of parliamentary laws that transpose directives is much higher, but varies considerably
between policy fields (Christensen 2009: 17; Müller et al. 2009: 11; König and Mäder 2007).
24 Several authors argue that when measuring the Europeanization of legislation, relevant legislation should be
separated from less relevant legislation (e.g. König and Mäder 2007). Beyond the problem of managing this
differentiation an a intersubjectively comprehensible way (the „key decisons“ as introduced by von Beyme 1997
and applied e.g. by König and Mäder definitely do not represent such an intersubjectively comprehensible way) I
see no compelling reason to do so. The argument that Europeanization might be considerable but that really
important issues are still mainly decided on the national level is little convincing (see Christensen 2009: 17). A
different point is put forward by Müller and Jenny who distinguish new laws from mere revisions, arguing that
including all minor revisions would bias the results (Müller and Jenny 2009).
25 There is a clear problem how to deal with subnational legislation that is passed in federal states (such as Länder
legislation in Germany). In the case mentioned of the state guarantees for Länder banks for instance, an effect of
European state aid policy could be identified when looking at the respective Länder laws, whereas the Federal
15
like national law, as so far does only the approach developed by the Asser Institute (Asser-Institute
2007).26

What has become obvious when addressing negative integration is that we not only have to deal with
decisions, but also with non-decisions, e.g. with laws that are not passed due to European law and policies,
but these are hard to operationalize.

With regard to the problem how to define policy areas, I hope to have brought up all relevant arguments
why we cannot rely on national portfolios. Since working with policy categories not only follows the desire
for creating order but basically reflects the hypothesis that there are different patterns of Europeanization
according to policy fields or sub-fields, these fields need to make sense in terms of coherence. Thus we
have to develop a system of policy fields that reflects coherent categories and allows for the subsumption
of specific measures into one category applicable to all countries. The categories offered by the European
data base Eur-Lex could provide a common system for a comparative analysis even though also here
some problems arise as Plehwe demonstrates (Plehwe 2008).

A less obvious problem that seems to be more of a technical nature is the time unit we chose. Election
periods (as used as time unit in my own study) obviously differ between countries and thus cannot be the
basis for collecting comparable data. However, working with yearly rates (as Page does) is problematic,
too, since – at least in the field of primary legislation – within election periods we usually see that few laws
are passed in the beginning, whereas most laws are passed in the last two years.27 For instance working
with the election periods of the European Parliament as time units would produce comparable data across
countries.

4. Elements of a Comparative Europeanization-Indicator

For improving our methods to measure the Europeanization of public policies I want to proceed in two
steps: First I want to propose the construction of a purely quantitative indicator that reflects all the
relevant criticism presented above. Second, I suggest to undertake some steps in complementing this
purely quantitative indicator of Europeanization with an indicator that combines quantitative and
qualitative elements, still coming up with numbers in the end.

Before doing so, I see a need to clarify what exactly is the dependent variable of my analysis, since existing
studies differ as to the very aspect they focus on. Neither do I want to identify policy change as a

state has no competences here (Grossman 2006: 341). Müller and Jenny in their Austrian study solved this
problem by including laws from one Land only (Müller and Jenny 2009).
26 Another important argument which is discussed in the literature is the very simple question if a law is an
adequate unit of analysis since laws can vary considerably in their size and content. A policy which is formed by
one law with many stipulations in one country (e.g. Austria or Denmark) could be formed by five laws with few
stipulations in another one (e.g. Netherlands, Bovens and Yesikalgit 2004: 18; more generally see Huber and
Shipan 2002). The same holds true for European law and for the Europeanization effect we attribute to the
individual European measures.
27 This will most probably not apply to the same extent to secondary legislation which is less subject to political
decision making.
16
consequence of European policies28 (as most Europeanization studies do, see e.g. Vink and Graziano
2007: 9) nor do I intent to look for national autonomy (and its restriction) as a more potential than factual
option that member states have (e.g. Uhl 2006). What I want to find out is how much (in which scope and
extent) national laws, seen as backbones of national policies, are shaped by European law and policies.

4.1 An Improved Concept for Measuring the Scope of Europeanization

A first indicator should allow for measuring the scope of Europeanization. For doing so, we have to
identify the ratio between European and Europeanized laws in relation to national laws. This comes close
to what Page, Christensen, Bovens and Yesilkalgit and others have introduced, but is different in three
respects:

First, it has to include primary and secondary law on the national side. Second, on the European side it has
to cover directives and regulations. The Asser-Institute presented a pilot-study calculating the share of
European legislation (directly applicable regulations) and Europeanized national legislation (i.e. national
law that serves to transpose a directive) of all legislation (national legislation plus European regulations).
For a first study, however, the Institute applied this approach only to two fields: culture and environment,
with the result that the share of Europeanized legislation is 6 per cent in culture policy and 66 per cent in
environmental policy (Asser Institute 2007). When applying a basically similar method to the German
transport policy, Plehwe identifies a share of Europeanized legislation of 65.7 per cent for the 15th election
period (Plehwe 2008).29

Third, different to the approach developed by Bovens and Yesilkagit, Christensen and the Asser Institute
that included aggregated data (all instruments valid at a certain period of time), we should focus on legal
acts that were passed in different periods of time in order to produce results that are comparable also
across time.30 Yet, different to the Asser-Study, we suggest to use the Eur-Lex classification of policy-areas
as a classification that should be applicable to all legislation in all member states.

For applying this approach, a database will have to be established that includes all national legislation and
organizes this legislation according to the EurLex classification, identifies (with the help of national and
European sources) the share of legislation that transposes a directive, and also covers the directly
applicable regulations in each policy field. Similar to the study by the Asser-Institute, one would have to

28 Yet, as Roederer-Rynning shows when analysing the Europeanization of national agricultural policy,
Europeanization needs not necessarily mean change due to “the European factor” that would otherwise not
have occurred. In agricultural policy, Europeanization is rather continuity of policies that would – most probably
– have changed without the “European factor” (Roederer-Rynning 2007: 223).
29 Yet, the data presented by Plehwe and by the Asser-Insitute are not comparable because Plehwe, using my
approach, works with data for each election period, whereas the Asser-Institute works with aggregated numbers.
30 Whereas the broader operationalization of Europeanization as displayed by the “European impulses” identified
in the German data base is per se a convincing way to operationalize Europeanization, we cannot use this
category for a comparative indicator for the simple reason of lack of data: this category will not be identified in
the legislative data-bases in other countries. However, working with word scoring techniques could allow for
basically identifying and comparing the share of (different) national legislations that refer to European measures
and possibly also the extent to which they do so (on such techniques see e.g. Laver and Benoit 2003).
17
start with a pilot study that focuses on a manageable set of policy fields, e.g. environmental policy, tax
policy and social policy in one Member State31 and then, step by step, apply this to the same policy fields
in some other Member States. Only when the method will be developed, tested and improved, it could be
applied to all policy fields for which the core assumptions apply32 in all member states we are interested in.

4.2 Measuring the Extent of Europeanization

Yet, several points of criticism can be put forward to such a purely quantitative approach. One important
point is that the measurement is highly superficial: Finding out that e.g. 70 per cent of a Member State’s
legislation in environmental policy has been influenced by European measures does not tell us much
about the very extent of Europeanization, e.g. whether most of these national laws were introduced only
due to European stipulations or whether only marginal aspects were adapted to European law, as other
authors trying to quantify self-critically concede (e.g. Müller and Jenny 2009: 15; Bovens and Yesilkagit
2009: 18).33 Another point is that numbers can be misleading in terms of impacts. For instance Plehwe
demonstrates for the field of road haulage that far reaching Europeanization has been brought about by
only one single regulation whereas in the field of railways a whole package of directives yielded only
hesitant Europeanization (Plehwe 2008). Thus the number of laws is not a very reliable unit to base the
analysis on.

This is where the second step seems crucial to produce a meaningful measurement of Europeanization,
allowing for identifying the extent of Europeanization by blending quantitative and qualitative approaches.
A tool has to be developed to measure for each case of Europeanized legislation the extent of
Europeanization. I suggest to do so by applying a two-dimensional matrix that for each Europeanized law
displays

a) the breadth of a regulation (allowing e.g. for the statement that from the five regulatory aspects a
legislation includes, three have been Europeanized whereas two have not); and
b) the depth of Europeanization, applying a modified version of the categories developed by Peter Hall
(1993).34 With this tool we could analyse what part of the national public policy (as materialized in the
legislation) has been subject of Europeanization:

31 The ratio for this preliminary choice is simple: Whereas it is rather uncontested that national environmental
policies nowadays are strongly shaped by the European Union it is equally common to believe that ,„issues
which are at the core of the political debate – such as the role of the welfare state and taxes and redistribution –
are mainly decided at the national level“ (Hegeland 2007: 109; see also Vink and Graziano 2007: 4). To critically
test such hypotheses would be the first task of such an undertaking.

33 Müller and Jenny for instance in their paper on Austria try to face this problem by introducing three categories:
national law that is „(almost) exclusively EU-induced“, national law that is „predominantly EU-induced“ and
national law that was “predominantly nationally induced” (Müller and Jenny 2009: 27).
34 It has to be a modified version of Hall’s categories because Hall (and policy analysis following Hall) use(s) these
categories in order to categorize policy-change. What we want to analyse here is not policy change but impact on
policy-shaping. What is more, we need one more category. Hall presents three kinds of policy change (first order
change with regard to levels of regulation, second order change with regard to instruments and third order
change which covers the change of overall political objectives, but at the same time instruments and levels of
18
- the regulatory level

- the instruments of regulation

- overall objectives (without necessarily touching upon instruments)

- all three elements, level, instruments and objectives

This approach also has to face the core problem of Europeanization research: The problem of measuring
the causal role of European factors particularly given the rivalling factors of globalization and domestic
factors (Haverland 2005; Vink and Graziano 2007: 116; Saurugger and Radaelli 2008: 214). Yet, since with
this approach we do not intent to analyse if and how much change there is due to European laws and
policies but how much of an identifiable piece of law has been influenced by European law and policies
we do not have the problem to first identify if there is change (and what kind of change) and second to
establish the causal link to European measures. We only want to identify the European impact on a
national measure which even though establishing causality is always a challenge in social science which can
be managed by applying sophisticated qualitative methods such as systematic process analysis (see Bennett
and George 2005; Hall 2008) or counterfactual reasoning (Haverland 2005: 4-6). A workable way to
translate these considerations into numbers has yet to be elaborated but seems feasible (see e.g. OECD
2005).

In a pilot study, this analytical tool should first be applied to a limited number of policy fields (e.g.
environmental policy, tax policy and social policy) in one member state , and respectively be extended to
the same policies in other member states (see above).

5. Discussion
Based on the presentation and discussion of methods to measure the Europeanization of national
legislation that have been developed so far, I presented first a concept for an indicator measuring the
scope of Europeanization, and second some ideas for a complementary indicator measuring the extent of
Europeanization. Certainly, many objections can be raised, either against the idea to measure
Europeanization at all or against the way I want to approach this objective. In this last section I want to
discuss the more general objections to the undertaking.

A first, rather global criticism that applies actually to all analyses that study the impact of European
policies on national policies, be they of qualitative or quantitative nature, is that they – deliberately – limit
their perspective to the impact on the member state level and tend to neglect the other side of the coin:
how member states’ governments influence and shape these policies. Most authors agree that “there are
two playing fields in the end” (Saurugger and Radaeli 2008: 211), but that there definitely is a connection
between how national players act on the European level and how a European policy agreed on is then

regulation, Hall 1993: 278f.). For the specific context of analysing the influence that European law and policies
have on national policies we need a fourth category in which policy objectives are influenced but regulatory
levels or instruments are not.
19
received in the respective member state (even though the nature of this connection is not yet totally clear,
see e.g. König and Mäder 2007: 37). The focus on Europeanization tends to reduce this complex
relationship and to make member states appear as victims of ever greedier European policy-makers that
desperately try to rescue their national autonomy under the adaptational pressures of European policies
(Saurugger and Radaelli 2008: 212). In reality however, Euroepanization might be less a zero-sum game
than it is suggested by such approaches. Member States are not only “downloaders” or “takers” of
European norms, models or pressures, but also “uploaders” or “shapers” of those (Brouard et al. 2007: 2).
Whereas qualitative studies are easier able to address this other side of the coin, naturally, a quantitative
approach is more in danger to reduce complexity of multilevel-governance in the way just described.
However, one could think about integrating this aspect as a third dimension into the extent of
Europeanization-indicator, for instance by assessing whether a certain European policy that needs to be
transposed into national law, was supported, seen with no specific attitude ore opposed at the national
level by the respective government. This is also where “discontinuity” comes in, describing a change in
political majorities on the member state level (and respective positions) between the passing of a directive
and the time of transposition of this directive (König 2007).

A second group of objections refer to the impossibility to account for a number of relevant qualitative
aspects of the Europeanization of public policies. One of these aspects is that a perspective that sees
European policies merely as constraints for national policies reduces the complex nature of change even
on the national level: E.g. Europeanization not simply restricts “national” options, but rather changes the
opportunity and possibly also motivation structures of national players, allows e.g. for the
instrumentalization of European “constrains” for specific national positions and empowers some national
actors at the costs of others (e.g. Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002; Grossman 2006). “Thus, instead of a causal
chain going down from the EU to the domestic level we have multiple pathways through which the EU
pressure is refracted, and in some cases rhetorically amplified if not constructed” (Saurugger and Radaelli
2008: 213).

The quantification of complex social constellations always implies a certain risk of over-simplification.
This risk must be balanced against the expected benefits. I hope to have argued convincingly that the
expected benefits of measuring the Europeanization of public policies will outweigh the risks.

Finally, the interpretation of the data we hope to produce with this method though is still a major puzzle. I
want to demonstrate this with regard to expectable variance of Europeanization between different
countries and over time: If for instance we identify different scopes and extents of Europeanization in let
us say the waste management policy in different member states, what does that mean? Certainly the extent
of Europeanization is a relative figure and thus not only depends on the European impact, but also on the
strength of a national policy that is „hit“ by the European policy (Müller et al. 2009: 14ff.). Thus where a
national policy had been rather parsimonious, the Europeanization effect of the same directive will be
stronger than where there is a mature national policy that has grown over years. Yet, a recent study
challenges the idea that one European measure means the same institutional constraints in all member

20
states altogether (Méndez et al 2008: 292). If for instance we identify a stable scope, but a decreasing
extent of Europeanization in a certain policy field or sub-field, does this mean that Europe is “in retreat”
(Bovens and Yesilkagit 2009: 20) and member states are regaining autonomy? Or does it just reflect the
fact that all relevant aspects have been regulated by the European Union?

Yet, having to puzzle about how to interpret such data would definitely be a progress compared to the
actual situation in which we still aim at „replacing wild guesses with precise figures“ (Müller et al. 2009: 2).

21
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