Enforcing European Union Anti-Discrimination Law: A Cross-Country Perspective

This paper examines the variation in legislative compliance with the European Union anti-discrimination directives in select European Union countries. While there is an extensive literature on compliance with the European Union law, we know relatively little about the influence of state structure on the compliance proceedings. This paper advances the argument that one of the potential causes of such variation in compliance is the degree of centralization within territorial as well as administrative decision-making domains of a country. The findings suggest that the territorially decentralized countries are violating the European Union anti-discrimination directives more often than their unitary counterparts. A substantive content analysis of the infringement-related documents is utilized to analyze the degree of member states’ compliance with the European Union anti-discrimination directives.