Effects of EU soft law across the multilevel system

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This project aims to advance understanding of the performance of the EU multilevel system through a longitudinal analysis of the nature and effect of soft law, beyond a crisis-centred research puzzle. EU law affects governments and populations and has direct influence on the lives of citizens. With the governance turn and ever more complex decision-making in Brussels legislation takes increasingly often the form of soft law. The term captures instruments such as recommendations, guidelines or communications that do not entail jurisdictional control, but produce important legal and practical effects. Yet, we still know relatively little why member states and EU institutions chose either soft or hard law to govern. What is the proportion of EU soft law in different policy areas? When and why is EU soft law implemented at domestic level? Once implemented, when and why does it feed back into EU policy-making? Employing lenses of contemporary legal scholarship on soft law and political science insights on public policy analysis, this project investigates whether, and if so when, why and how soft law affects the performance of the EU multilevel system.The project is important because it addresses a central topic of political systems, namely the relationship between law and politics. In delivering a systematic, comparative and longitudinal assessment of the nature and effects of this soft law, the project goes beyond existing accounts that either optimistically stipulate the potential of soft law for effective policy making or pessimistically point at its narrow legal relevance, the creation of uncertainties and lack of accountability often based on static accounts of a legal phenomenon.The project is original in that it will analytically distinguish hard and soft law in light of two elements: the binding nature of the norm and the enforcement mechanism that ensures compliance with the norm. To our knowledge, this project will be the first to also causally analyse the effects of soft law across policy sectors and countries, including dynamic feedback into EU policy-making.The project is ambitious in its scope and design. First, it will assess the nature of EU soft law through a complete inventory of EU level instruments adopted in eight policy domains that differ in the character of EU policy-making and in the nature of the underlying policy-problem, over a 15 year period. Second, it will analyse the effect of sectoral and country specific factors on the implementation of EU soft law through a survey in central administrations and courts as well as causal analysis and structured focused comparison of 64 domestic implementation processes. Third, it will investigate the feedback effects of soft law implementation at supranational level. Finally, the project makes it possible to employ a multidisciplinary perspective and country expertise by combining a team of German and French political science and legal scholars.