Content area
Full text
Joshua C. Fjelstul is a Ph.D. candidate, Department of Political Science, Emory University, 1555 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322 ([email protected]). Clifford J. Carrubba is a Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, 1555 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322 ([email protected]).
We thank Matt Gabel, Adam Glynn, Greg Martin, John Patty, Miguel Rueda, Craig Volden, five anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the APSR for their helpful comments. We also thank participants in the Faculty Research Speaker Series, Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GJIRV0.
How effective are international institutions at enforcing international agreements? Scholars have been studying this question with regards to international adjudicatory bodies (courts) for decades (e.g., Chayes and Chayes 1993; Burley and Mattli 1993; Alter 2001; Sweet and Brunell 1998; Rosendorff 2005; Rosendorff and Milner 2001; Carrubba 2005; Carrubba and Gabel 2015; Keohane 1984; Simmons 2009; Simmons and Danner 2010).1 The consensus is that these courts are effective at curtailing state noncompliance. What has received less attention is what happens after an agreement is signed and before a case gets to court. International agreements can also empower international bureaucracies to monitor and enforce international law. Given international courts’ limited time and resources, such agencies can be invaluable partners in helping promote compliance. But to what degree and in what ways is little explored to date. Are they simply able to catch and correct unintentional noncompliance, or can their investigatory procedures accomplish more? What does it mean for a multistaged investigation to be wrapped up early versus late? Is one or the other an indication of institutional efficacy? In this paper, we examine the capacity of one particular international bureaucracy, the European Commission, to help promote compliance with international law.
The European Commission—the executive body of the EU—is responsible for monitoring and implementing EU law.2 One of the most important mechanisms by which it does so is the infringement procedure. This procedure is a multistage process in which the Commission first raises concerns over whether a member state is properly implementing...