EU administrative acts are legally binding acts adopted by the Commission without the involvement of the Council, the European Parliament of any other institution and come in the form of Commission decision, Commission regulation, and Commission directive. When member states are confronted with supranational administrative acts they don’t only have the option of compliance or non-compliance. They can – as a third option - initiate legal compliance conflict by subjecting the Commission’s act to judicial review.
The paper presents a formal decision-theoretic model of governments’ decisions to choose legal conflict over the other available options and tests the implications of this model with the help regression analysis.
This way, the paper hopes to make two contributions to research on compliance and implementation. First, this paper extends the empirical scope of compliance research beyond the analysis of compliance with EU legislation, which dominates the field, by focusing on compliance with supranational administrative acts. Second, with this conceptual focus, the paper outlines how the analysis of compliance and research on the judicialization of EU politics could be fruitfully combined to better understand the dynamics of compliance conflict.
