Putting Politics into perspective

In the area of public utilities, the member states of the European Union (EU) have agreed on ambitious policies to open up markets for competition and to regulate these markets. To have the expected effect, these policies have to be implemented effectively. In this book it is demonstrated that this is problematic; difficulties appear already in the first step of transposing the directives into national legislation. The analysis of an original quantitative data set including all public utilities directives and their transposition in five member states ? the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Greece ? shows that almost two thirds of all cases are transposed after the deadlines that are included in the directives. In order to explain problems with the implementation of EU policies, three main types of variables are used in the literature, namely political, administrative, and institutional variables. In recent literature on transposition the focus is on political