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The article focuses on the mobilisation of government officials who possess a high level of expertise to the interest of advance leaders in European Union (EU) policy-making. It explores the importance of a high level of expertise because it access to relevant decision-making fora. It highlights the importance of looking the coalition partners to benefit from the good contacts with experts from European Union institutions.

This article seeks to systematically describe and explain variation in European Union policy implementation performance across member states and directives. The analyses rely on a new and original dataset comprising comparable information about transposition delay for practically all EU social directives in Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. On the basis of nearly 300 observations, we could establish that only in 42.7 per cent of our cases did member states transpose in time; 17.5 per cent exceeded the deadline by more than two years. The analysis reveals modest variation between social policy areas, more profound cross-country differences and strong cross-area variations within some countries. The need for inter-ministerial coordination and administrative inefficiency are strongly associated with transposition delay. Whether a directive is new or merely an amendment is unrelated to transposition delay. The same holds for the directive’s complexity and parliamentary involvement in the transposition process. The irrelevance of the latter factors may suggest that member states anticipate some potential challenges to transposition performance and act to mitigate them. Whether and why this is the case merits further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares old-age pension policy trajectories in the Netherlands and Germany. These two advanced welfare states have developed different financial arrangements despite similarities in policy legacies, political institutions and party systems. Both countries established and extended comprehensive pay-asyou-go financed public pension schemes in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the Netherlands achieved a fully fledged multi-tiered pension system with a strong funded component, while until recently the German system relied almost exclusively on pay-as-you-go financing. The Netherlands has, therefore, a financially more viable and sustainable set of pension arrangements than Germany, at least under the current and foreseeable economic and demographic conditions. The paper reconstructs the pension trajectories in the two countries in order to explore the role of path dependency, political choice and contingency in explaining this divergence. It is argued that divergence is essentially unrelated to different strategic choices or variations in institutional capacities for reform. Instead, divergence is the largely unintended consequence of a series of incremental decisions in combination with contingent events and developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]