Compliance with EU Law: Explaining the transposition of EU directives

The objective of this project is to produce a large user-friendly and research-oriented database of the national measures that transpose EU directives into domestic law in order to provide the basis for large-N theoretically-based academic research on the causes of variance in the timing and quality of national implementation.
The pre-existing databases on national transposition were not designed to facilitate academic research. The Commission publishes an annual report on the application of Community law, but it lists only the proportion of directives that have been transposed up to a given year, without providing data on delay of transposition. It also uses cumulative data since 1960, creating a severe upward bias in the national compliance record. The report tends to consider a directive transposed when the first measure has been notified by the Member States. But transposition normally needs more than one national measure, so the Commission’s data are likely overestimated compliance. Finally, no information is provided on the dates and instruments of national transposition.
Recently, Celex, the EU legal database, has been opened to the public for free online consultation. The database contains approximately 3,000 directives, but it is not designed in a way that could be immediately used for research purposes. Fields than contains dates need to be converted from string to date format. Deadlines for the adoption of national measures need to be separated from deadlines for the application. There are no fields containing the dates of adoption of national transposition measures. These need to be deducted from the title of national implementing measures or by other available means. Moreover, there are no fields that record the types on national measures. Finally, there are mistakes and missing information that need correcting and completing.
The project consists of migrating the raw data available from Celex into an appropriately-designed database.