Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper reports quantitative results designed to test what impact, if any, the implementation of formal compliance management systems within organizations has on compliance. We argue that it is important to distinguish between the likely impact of implementation of formal compliance systems, attitudes and values towards compliance within the organization and the way compliance is managed in practice. Formal compliance systems and attitudes and values towards compliance are only likely to influence actual compliance to the extent that they work together to influence the way compliance is routinely managed in practice in a firm. We test the relationship between compliance system implementation and compliance in the domain of competition and consumer protection compliance amongst 999 of the largest businesses in Australia. We find evidence that greater implementation of compliance systems is associated with better compliance management in practice within the organizations in our study, and that better compliance management in practice is associated with better compliance outcomes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Discourses take place in many political, judicial and societal arenas within and beyond nation-states. However, we still know little on the conditions, under which they matter. When do discourses facilitate ideational changes and allow for outcomes beyond lowest-common denominator solutions? This paper focuses on cases, in which governments violated international law knowingly and willingly in the first place and maintain non-compliance despite they were detected and infringement procedures were initiated. Since governmental policy interests are eminently strong and rigidly pointing towards non-compliance, states cannot easily be talked into compliance with a norm interpretation beyond the lowest common denominator. In focusing on these least likely cases for successful discourses, this paper addresses the following questions: How can infringement cases, in which governments stubbornly maintain non-compliance, be resolved? Can judicial discourses induce compliance and if so, under which conditions?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: What drives candidate countries? compliance or non-compliance with the liberal democratic membership requirements of the European Union? Despite being subject to the same formal entry criteria imposed on themselves as part of the EU?s accession conditionality, why do some candidates manage to comply faster and better than others? In 1997 the European Union announced a reinforced pre-accession strategy which meant a hardened political conditionality in two respects. First, the political membership conditions were given more clarity and substance. In order to satisfy the loosely defined Copenhagen criteria known as ?the stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities?, candidate countries were gradually demanded to take concrete democratic steps ranging from ensuring political participation and opposition to strengthening civil society and the independence of the media and the judiciary. Second, and in parallel to the rising specificity of the conditions, the EU developed the tools for monitoring and enforcing the conditions. These tools consisted of both verbal signals and deeds which would credibly link compliance to rewards ranging from candidacy status and start of accession negotiations to full membership, and noncompliance to denial of rewards. This hardened EU conditionality has been met by varying policy responses on the part of the Central and Eastern European countries waiting to join the EU. While countries like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Slovenia showed broad compliance with the political criteria as early as 1998 and became full members in 2004, others like Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey have fallen short of full compliance and hence are not yet full members. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the factors that lie behind the national variation in compliance (measured here as EU-demanded democratic legislation) by studying one ?easy case? of compliance, the case of Poland, and two ?hard cases?, those of Romania and Turkey. In all these cases, compliance began in different time periods. For Poland, the start date of compliance was early 1990s. For Romania, it was 1996, and for Turkey, it was 2001. Furthermore, in both Romania and Turkey, the degree of compliance showed variations over time. Both countries proceeded to ?ideal? compliance after initial periods of ?problematic? compliance marked by slow and less substantive reform-oriented legislation. Although the literature on Europeanization has recently focused on the causal mechanisms of compliance, it needs to be developed to capture the dynamic relationships between hardening EU conditionality and the national political parties in government as the principal domestic political actors subject to the EU?s pressure for democratization. The paper seeks to fill this gap by exploring: a) the conditions under which national compliance/non-compliance occurs independent of the EU?s leverage and due to purely domestic political dynamics national governing parties find themselves in, b) the conditions under which the EU?s conditionality causes governing political parties to change their previous positions on compliance to either support or oppose political reforms. This investigation warrants an inquiry which goes beyond a mere theoretical analysis grounded in existing academic literature on international organizations - domestic links. I believe that scholarly responsibility consists of analyzing not only theoretical but also real world policy implications of a research question. When it comes to the topic of national compliance with the EU?s democratizing pressure, such study needs to problematize both the effectiveness of the EU?s policy of conditionality and the domestic political mechanisms that interact with it. For this purpose, the paper uses two methods: First, using content analysis and coding the EU?s conditionality signals, it shows on graphs the degree of hardness of EU conditionality (measured as clear and credible conditionality) and the degree of case compliance (measured as number of EU-demanded democratic legislation) from 1993 to 2006. This will help reveal whether compliance trends followed the changes in conditionality. Second, it complements this empirical evidence with detailed process-tracing (which includes fieldwork currently conducted in Turkey) to discover the domestic dynamics that worked in isolation from (or in conjunction with) conditionality to produce the observed trends in compliance.Ultimately, the findings of this paper will inform not only academics but also policy-makers in both EU circles and the countries striving for membership in the EU. On the one hand, by suggesting causal mechanisms linking EU conditionality to national compliance, it will contribute to the existing scholarly literature on the topic. On the other, it will be a policy oriented effort intended to illustrate the actual compliance problems faced by Poland, Turkey and Romania and thus serve as a guide to other Balkan countries which may seek EU membership in the future.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Political leaders must seek political survival at the domestic level. This often creates powerful incentives to break commitments to international institutions. Many of these violations are unobserved as they do not generate observable responses. Thus