Europeanizing from the centre Core executive institutions and the transposition of the European Community legislation in Poland 1997-2002.

This thesis examines the transposition of the European Community legislation in Poland prior to accession. The principal research question is: What were the factors that facilitated and inhibited transposition over time. The key argument is that the Polish government's transposition record was decisively influenced by the configuration of rules that the domestic core executive could use to extend selective incentives and monitoring to ministers and ministerial departments. The thesis starts by showing that the adoption of transposing legislation during pre-accession was likely to have been complicated by significant collective action problems that discouraged ministers and their staff from contributing to the transposition record. It develops an explanatory hypothesis that focuses on selective incentives and monitoring extended by the core executive vis-a-vis line ministries. The central part of the thesis presents original empirical data on cross-temporal changes in both core executive rules and the transposition record. In two concluding chapters the thesis brings together the data on core executive institutions and transposition to show that the institutionalization of stricter core executive constraints vis-a-vis line ministries led to a marked improvement of Poland's transposition record. It further finds that the effect of the core executive variable was influenced by EU incentives and party political constellations. These findings hold interesting implications for the study of Europeanization of public policy in the new and old EU member states and, more broadly, for further research on national executives and transposition.