Parliamentary Transposition of EU Legislation in Bulgaria and Romania

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1.7, Humboldt-University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: This essay is a comparative study of transposition records of EU directives in the case of Bulgaria and Romania in the years following EU accession in 2007. It will also consider the role the respective national parliament has played. It thereby closes an empirical gap in contemporary researches on the topic. First, this study will review the academic literature on the roles that national parliaments in CEE countries have played after the collapse of the Soviet Union with special reference to transition efforts of these countries. Bulgaria's and Romania's cases will be further sketched out. Afterwards, the methodology for evaluating national parliament's involvement in the transposition of EU directives will be outlined, before turning the attention to the comparative analysis of the two case studies. The transposition of EU regulations into national legislation is at the heart of the European integration project as this step of the policy process provides for the congruence and non-discrimination of domestic policies among European Union (EU) member states. Compliance with supranational law shall guarantee state practice to common standards within a Union marked by economic disequilibria and political idiosyncracies of each country. Indeed, empirical studies have revealed that timely transposition of EU directives vary across member countries as well as policy areas. More generally, the transposition of EU law within a fixed deadline is positively correlated to central national preferences and run rather smoothly in issue areas of secondary importance to relevant state actors. In countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) however it has been argued that EU accession would lead to some kind of 'compliance fatigue' once the intended goal of EU membership has been reached.