Dimiter Toshkov
email: dtoshkov@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Embracing European Law Compliance with EU Directives in Central and Eastern Europe

Accession to the European Union (EU) demands the adoption of a vast body of legislation. This paper analyses compliance with EU directives in eight post-communist countries during the Eastern enlargement and tries to account for the puzzling embrace of EU law in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on a new data set tracking the transposition of a sample of 119 directives, the paper finds effects of both political preferences and government capacity on the likelihood of timely transposition. Furthermore, important sectoral differences are uncovered, with trade-related legislation having a better chance and environmental legislation having a significantly worse chance of being incorporated into national legal systems on time. Beyond the conditionality of the accession process, the paper unveils a complex causal structure behind the ups and downs in transposition performance.

Introduction

The transformations of government and society in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since the beginning of the 1990s have proven a fertile ground for the study of institutional persistence and change [START_REF] Elster | Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea[END_REF][START_REF] Grzymala-Busse | The Discreet Charm of Formal Institutions. Postcommunist Party Competition and State Oversight[END_REF][START_REF] Stark | Postsocialist Pathways. Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe[END_REF]. More recently, the confluence of these reforms with the European integration of the region presented a rare chance to witness how internal impulses and external pressure for change combine to produce patterns of political and policy reforms [START_REF] Dimitrov | Governing after Communism: Institutions and Policymaking[END_REF][START_REF] Vachudova | Europe Undivided. Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism[END_REF]. This paper deals with the impact of the European Union (EU) on law and policy-making in CEE. Analysing the adoption of EU law in the new member states, I explore and try to explain the variation in the pace of implementing EU directives during the last enlargement in eight post-communist countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

States aspiring to become members of the EU have to incorporate into their national legal systems more than 80,000 pages of legislation in the course of a few years. 1 Given the Herculean proportions of this task, and the systematic troubles of the 'old' member states to transpose EU law on time, it is a genuine puzzle (and one that has remained largely unnoticed) that the post-communist countries have been rather successful in adapting to EU law. As Figure 1 shows, the mean transposition deficit in the new member states (EU-10) is lower than the average percentage of non-transposed directives in the EU-15. Furthermore, as of 2007 the best-performing countries are new entrants and the worst performer amongst the EU-10 still does better than the worst EU-15 country.

The contributions of this paper go beyond drawing attention to the unlikely embrace of EU law in CEE. The performance of the new members is not uniform and important differences across countries, policy sectors and types of directives exist. In order to address this variation, I perform a quantitative analysis of a new data set tracking the transposition performance of the eight countries from the start of the accession negotiations in the late 1990s until 2005 (a year and a half after the actual enlargement). Using logistic regression, I attempt to capture simultaneously the effect of EU-level factors, the national institutional context and the changing landscape of political preferences in CEE on the likelihood of timely transposition. 2 National government preferences appear related to the rate of incorporating EU law. Both government positions on a socioeconomic left/right scale and attitudes towards EU accession have a significant effect on the likelihood of timely transposition. The capacity of governments to transpose is, however, constrained by a high number of parties in government and bureaucratic quality, as well as by the regulatory environment in a country. Directives related to trade barriers have higher chances of being implemented within the deadline, whereas implementing legislation, highly politically complex laws and costly directives are more likely to suffer delays.

The findings of the analysis have considerable societal relevance because the transposition of European legislation is the basis of the internal market. A detailed knowledge of the state of implementation and the reasons behind the ups and downs in the member states' performance is valuable for policy experts, as well as for social scientists. The comparative study of the adoption of EU law in CEE presents a new setting for applying and testing the growing number of implementation/compliance theories, but it also provides insight into how policy-making in transition settings works.

The article is structured as follows. The next section places the current text in the context of EU enlargement, transposition and implementation studies. The discussion of the contributions and shortcomings of existing work is followed by a section explicating the theoretical arguments investigated in the empirical analysis. Next, the operationalization, data collection and research methodology are presented in some detail. The subsequent section contains the results of the empirical analysis. Lastly, the conclusion sums up the findings.

Theorizing transposition in the context of enlargement negotiations

The problem of adapting to EU law in CEE is of major interest for two research agendas: understanding the unfolding and the impact of the last EU enlargement round, and understanding compliance in a multi-level system of governance. The intersection of these two research areas provides the immediate intellectual context of the current study.

Relatively few studies directly address the question of transposing/ implementing EU rules in the new member states. Studies that are built on a comparative approach or a systematic empirical analysis are even harder to find. One of the few exceptions is the study by [START_REF] Hille | It's the Bureaucracy, Stupid": The Implementation of the Acquis Communautaire in EU Candidate Countries, 1999-2003[END_REF], who construct a measurable indicator of implementation performance in CEE for the period from 1999 to 2003 and try to match the resulting patterns with the bureaucratic strength of the governments and the national political constraints. The authors conclude that 'the functioning and the quality of the domestic bureaucracy constitute crucial preconditions for effective alignment with EU policy requirements' (Hille and Knill, 2006: 549). The study, however, employs a rather indirect measure of implementation performance -an indicator measuring 'the frequency, direction and intensity of criticism or approval of the candidate countries' performances' as expressed in the European Commissions' reports on the progress towards accession (Hille and Knill, 2006: 541). A further shortcoming is the possible endogeneity of the dependent variable and the major explanatory factor -bureaucratic quality as measured by the expert ratings collected for the World Bank governance indicators. Although the use of expert scores to assess various aspects of governance is not problematic as such, the analysts' assessments are likely to stem at least to some degree from the criticisms or approvals contained in the Commission reports.

The relatively strong explanatory power of administrative efficiency vis-à-vis party political preferences and institutional factors is also uncovered in an analysis of the transposition and implementation of social policy directives [START_REF] Toshkov | Transposition of EU Social Policy in the New Member-States[END_REF]. Measuring the legislative 'productivity' of the CEE applicants in each six-month period from 1998 to 2005, the study finds administrative efficiency to have a strong and positive effect, government EU integration support to have a smaller but still significant impact and left/right ideological positions to have no effect at all. Owing to the peculiarities of the social policy sector, however, it is an open question whether these results can be generalized to the entire spectrum of EU activities.

The adaptation in the social policy field has also been analysed in depth in the cases of Poland [START_REF] Leiber | Transposition of EU Social Policy in Poland: Are There Different "Worlds of Compliance" in East and West?[END_REF] and Slovakia [START_REF] Dimitrova | The Power of Norms in the Transposition of EU Directives[END_REF]. Leiber shows the good performance of Poland in terms of legal implementation and emphasizes that the conditionality of accession is a major driving force. Interpreting the Slovakian case, Dimitrova and Rhinard find evidence for the impact of norm compatibility.

Comparative case studies possess clear advantages in addressing the issue of cross-sector and cross-country differences in implementation performance. [START_REF] Andonova | Transnational Politics of the Environment. The European Union in Central and Eastern Europe[END_REF] examines the impact of the EU on environmental policies in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. Analysing the performance in several subsectors, the author reveals the crucial role of domestic industry interests in successful adaptation and the role of the political institutions in furthering or constraining the change.

Exploring variation in a single country over time is another way of addressing the causal structure behind transposition/implementation performance. Working with transposition data from Poland during the time of accession, [START_REF] Zubek | Complying with Transposition Commitments in Poland: Collective Dilemmas, Core Executive and Legislative Outcomes[END_REF] finds that the crucial factors that speeded up the process of adopting the acquis were the centralization of authority in the executive, manifested in the exercise of strong political leadership as well as the centralization of coordination structures, and the improvement in administrative capacity. In addition, the dominant role of the executive vis-à-vis the legislature has enhanced performance in Poland.

The literature reviewed provides some analytical leverage in regard to the problem of explaining the adoption of EU law in CEE. The strong positive impact of bureaucratic quality and administrative efficiency and the focal role the executive plays seem to be corroborated by most studies. Political preferences and the institutional structure are rarely found to be important, at least at the aggregate level. The main shortcoming of the literature is the limited ability to provide generalizations. The failure to go beyond policy sectors, countries and rather short time periods can be traced to the lack of comparable, reliable and valid measures of transposition performance.

The main theoretical focus of the more general literature on Europeanization in CEE (for a review see [START_REF] Sedelmeier | Europeanisation in New Member and Candidate States[END_REF] has been the influence of accession conditionality: the power of the EU to demand reforms in exchange for the prospects of accession to the Union [START_REF] Dimitrova | Enlargement, Institution-Building and the EU's Administrative Capacity Requirement[END_REF][START_REF] Grabbe | Europeanization Goes East: Power and Uncertainty in the EU Accession Process[END_REF]Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, 2005). The impact of conditionality, however, cannot explain the cross-national variation in the transposition performance of the CEE countries. Furthermore, it is an open question whether the finer details of policy changes in the region can be related to the conditionality applied by the EU. What we need in order to explain the patterns of transposition in the region is a framework that incorporates country-and policy-level influences, as well as EU-wide pressures.

Hypotheses

Implementation performance depends on the willingness and capability of the relevant domestic actors to 'download', process, interpret and adapt European rules and adopt the corresponding national legislation [START_REF] Börzel | Conceptualizing the Domestic Impact of Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Haas | Compliance with EU Directives: Insights from International Relations and Comparative Politics[END_REF][START_REF] Jensen | Implementing Europe: A Question of Oversight[END_REF][START_REF] Tallberg | Paths to Compliance: Enforcement, Management and the European Union[END_REF]. Cast at such a general level, this thesis can accommodate all of the factors suggested by the existing literature (and probably all conceivable factors). Nevertheless, it is useful as a starting point in order to structure the theoretical discussion. Also, since the implicit causal model is quite complex, 3 I will present the variables according to the level at which they operate (national, EU, policy sector).

National level: The willingness to comply

Who the relevant actors are, what their relevant preferences are and what affects their capabilities are the main questions the theoretical argument has to address. In the context of accession negotiations, the domestic actors that have the greatest potential to affect adaptation outcomes are the government in power and the bureaucracies they steer. Although the CEE countries inherited from their communist past weak executives without strategic policymaking capabilities, it is the governments that conduct the negotiations and are held responsible by their electorates for the results of the talks and by the EU authorities for honouring their commitments. Although the degree of centralization of EU-related power by the executive (and within the executive) varies, the governments in power are the main actors in regard to the process of legal implementation of the directives of the EU [START_REF] Dimitrov | Governing after Communism: Institutions and Policymaking[END_REF][START_REF] Goetz | Governmentalizing Central Executives in Post-Communist Europe: A Four-Country Comparison[END_REF].

How do the ideological profile and positions of governments affect the likelihood of EU rules being transposed on time or not? Transposition takes time. The European law has to be identified, translated, consulted and adapted. Each step of the process demands time and resources, and this implies missed opportunity costs for the government to deal with other issues. Because directives allow a certain amount of discretion, even more time and resources can be spent on bringing the provisions of the directive closer to the policy preferences of governments. In short, the less the provisions of the law coincide with government preferences, the longer a government will take to transpose a piece of legislation and, by implication, the lower will be the likelihood that it will be transposed on time. Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to get information on the fit of each and every EU law with national government preferences. At a higher level of aggregation, however, it is reasonable to assume that the respective governments' positions towards European integration and the prospects of accession should be positively related to their assessment of individual EU rules. Furthermore, especially in the context of accession, government support for the EU should have an additional positive impact on the speed of transposition, because the governments will be more willing to sacrifice their substantive policy positions in order to fulfil the requirements of the EU and secure accession.

The link between societal support for the EU and implementation outcomes has been proposed in the past [START_REF] Lampinen | Implementation Deficit -Why Member States Do Not Comply with EU Directives?[END_REF][START_REF] Mbaye | Why National States Comply with Supranational Law: Explaining Implementation. Infringements in the European Union, 1972-1993[END_REF]. The effect of membership benefits, a closely related theme, has also been explored [START_REF] Perkins | Do Membership Benefits Buy Regulatory Compliance? An Empirical Analysis of EU Directives 1978-99[END_REF]. The distinctive feature of the hypothesis tested in this article is that it looks specifically at the impact of government preferences.

It is more difficult to hypothesize the impact of socioeconomic left/right government positions (for a preference-based explanation of compliance, see [START_REF] Thomson | The Paradox of Compliance: Infringements and Delays in Transposing European Union Directives[END_REF]. The body of EU legislation is quite heterogeneous and it is difficult to theoretically derive an expectation for their impact. Still, to the extent that a lot of the acquis implies trade liberalization and the retreat of the state from certain industries (e.g. telecommunications, transport, energy), left (socialist) governments can be expected to be less happy with the implications of these reforms and thus to postpone the adoption of implementing national legislation [START_REF] Linos | How Can International Organizations Shape National Welfare States? Evidence from Compliance with EU Directives[END_REF].

H1: Pro-European and economically liberal government preferences increase the probability of timely transposition.

National level: The capability to comply

The willingness of governments to adopt and implement EU laws is constrained by their capability to do so. Several sources of limited capacity can be identified. Some of these are connected to internal government factors, others are conditioned on the wider public administration system, and yet others are related to the different types of EU legislation to be adopted in the course of enlargement.

Government capacity can be conceptualized and operationalized in several ways. First of all, when governing in a coalition, political parties have to reconcile different political preferences. The more distant government partners are, the more difficult it is for them to direct reforms and adopt legislation, including EU-related acts. Whereas single-party majority governments have fewer hurdles to overcome to enact their proposals, multi-party cabinets have to accommodate more actors. The constraining effect of coalition government can be expected to reveal itself in various ways. The number of parties in government and the preference distance between the most extreme partners provide different possibilities to measure and test the proposed impact of government capacity.

H2: Higher government capacity increases the probability of timely transposition.

The number of parties in government and the ideological distance are closely related to the concept of veto players (e.g. [START_REF] Kaeding | Determinants of Transposition Delay in the European Union[END_REF][START_REF] Steunenberg | Hare or Turtle? Member States Catching up with the Transposition of EU Directives[END_REF]. However, given the broad institutional similarities in the CEE region, the number of parties in government captures de facto the variation in veto points. Only the Czech Republic and Poland have a bicameral parliament and the involvement of presidents in the legislative process is broadly similar in all the countries concerned. Also, none of the countries has a federal structure. Other national institutional features such as established systems of relationships between government, labour and business do affect the capability of government to steer through, and later implement, institutional and legislative changes (see [START_REF] Kaeding | Determinants of Transposition Delay in the European Union[END_REF]. However, in the case of the CEE countries there is no accepted measure of the degree of corporatism at the national level -a shortcoming limiting the opportunities to explore the argument in this paper.

Governments do not operate in an institutional vacuum. What they can achieve is conditioned on the broader governance system and the capabilities of the public administration. Especially for the case of transposition in post-communist Europe, it seems quite likely that the bureaucracies will have a constraining effect on the success of EU-related reforms. At the start of accession negotiations, all the candidate countries from CEE were still experiencing the consequences of the political, economic and social changes resulting from the collapse of the communist regimes [START_REF] Elster | Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea[END_REF]. Their bureaucracies, simultaneously agents and subjects of reform, had to adapt to functioning in a completely different environment [START_REF] Dimitrova | Enlargement, Institution-Building and the EU's Administrative Capacity Requirement[END_REF]. An understanding of the implementation performance therefore has to take into account the political institutions and the public administrations of the applicant countries. All else being equal, in countries and time periods of higher administrative efficiency, the chance of EU legislation being adopted within the deadlines should be greater. In a different twist of the same argument, regulatory quality should also be positively related to successful approximation. 4 H3: Higher administrative efficiency and better regulatory quality increase the probability of timely transposition.

EU level: Characteristics of the laws and policy sectors

The hypotheses discussed so far concern (slowly changing) attributes of the applicant countries. The causal process behind transposition, however, is more complex and combines the influence of country-, policy-and directivespecific variables. The policy sector and individual directive-specific aspects can be linked to the capacity of being able to implement EU laws in a timely and proper way.

Laws that have a wider field of application, affect politically salient issues and deal with complex matters demand more from governments and administrations (see [START_REF] Mastenbroek | Surviving the Deadline. The Transposition of EU Directives in the Netherlands[END_REF][START_REF] Kaeding | Determinants of Transposition Delay in the European Union[END_REF]. On the other hand, implementing legislation that only further develops and specifies framework rules already applied should create fewer problems and require fewer resources to be transposed. Policy sectors regulated by complex and costly rules are likely to be subject of transposition delays. The implied costs of legislation should be a significant hurdle for the timely adoption of national transposing measures and the implementation of the European legislation.

H4:

The political complexity and implied costs of legislation decrease the probability of timely transposition.

Finally, trade relations between the applicant countries and the EU underpin the entire integration process and they should have an effect on the transposition of the acquis because a large part of the EU body of rules concerns product standards, barriers to trade and other measures that regulate the trade exchange with the Single Market. Countries that do not transpose and implement this type of legislation fast will suffer from restricted access to the markets of the Union and thus face significant incentives to approximate their legislation to the acquis. Further, the removal of barriers to trade is a process of negative integration and, as such, involves fewer adaptation costs for the countries. 5 H5: Trade-related legislation is more likely to be transposed on time.

This set of hypotheses does not represent a fully integrated theory of transposition. Rather, it adapts propositions introduced in the literature on Europeanization and compliance to the case of transposition during accession negotiations and combines them to take account simultaneously of the will and the capability of governments and bureaucracies to implement EU law. In the remainder of the paper these hypotheses will be operationalized and the results of their empirical test will be presented.

Data and operationalization

The empirical analysis is based on a new data set derived from CELEX and other sources. In this section the operationalization of the concepts and the hypotheses will be described briefly, as well as the measurement of the variables, the sources of the collected data, the structure of the data set and other related issues.

Sample selection

A quantitative analysis of transposition performance requires more data than the readily available snapshots of transposition deficits published by the European Commission. The CELEX (now incorporated by EURLEX) database [START_REF] König | Quantifying European Legislative Research: Using Celex and Prelex in EU Legislative Studies[END_REF] offers the opportunity to gather information on the individual directive level: it is possible to follow the transposition of each directive in all the member states. At the time of EU enlargement there were approximately 1700 directives in force that were eligible for transposition. A random sample of 119 directives was drawn from this population. The sample was checked to make sure that it is sufficiently representative of the entire population of directives in terms of important characteristics such as the policy sectors covered and the period of adoption. The randomness of the selection of the directives maximizes the chances that the particular pieces of legislation chosen for further study are representative of the entire body of EU directives and that the sample is not biased towards specific types of directives. The sample was deliberately not filtered to pick up, for example, only highly important laws, because the focus of this study is transposition of EU legislation in general.

Figure 2 presents the temporal dynamics of the transposition of the selected sample of directives in the candidate countries (the 'Luxembourg' group started negotiations for membership in 1997; negotiations were opened with the 'Helsinki' group countries in 1999). It is clear that the overwhelming majority of the legislation was transposed in 2004, although the peak for Lithuania, Estonia and the Czech Republic was in 2003, whereas Latvia has a more even spread. The Polish efforts are the most highly concentrated (in 2004). The drop in 2005 is an artefact of the data (because very few observations had deadlines for transposition after 2004) and does not necessarily imply a decline in transposition rates. The sample does not allow us to draw any strong conclusions about the post-accession phase of compliance. There is no observable effect of the moment of signing the Treaty of Accession, in April 2003, which theoretically strips conditionality power from the EU. Since legislative preparation takes time, most of the acts adopted in 2004 were already in the legislative pipeline by the time of concluding the treaty.

Dependent variable

The phenomenon of interest in the current study is transposition performance. Transposition performance can be measured in a variety of ways. First of all, a binary variable can be created that detects whether or not an individual transposition process has been completed on time. An alternative approach is to measure the duration of each transposition process, or the time between the transposition and the deadline of the directive. Aggregating the Source: own compilation.

data over certain time and/or spatial units provides yet another opportunity.

In this way we measure the number of completed transpositions within a temporal and/or spatial unit (or the backlog -the non-completed transpositions) and create a count variable. Finally, the proportion of completed transpositions from the total outstanding cases can be computed as a crosssectional snapshot of transposition performance. Each measurement approach is related with specific statistical methods of analysis and the associated opportunities and constraints for the exploration of the data. This paper operationalizes transposition performance as a binary variable, taking the value of '1' if a transposition process has been completed within the deadline in a certain country, and the value of '0' otherwise. 6 For all directives with a transposition deadline before 1 May 2004, the effective deadline is taken to be the date of accession (1 May 2004). For the rest of the directives, the effective deadline is the normal transposition deadline as recorded in CELEX. CELEX reports data on the national implementing measures (NIM) notified by each member state in regard to every directive. A directive is considered to be non-transposed within the deadline if no NIMs were found in the database or if the latest NIM was adopted after the deadline had passed. Because member states sometimes report national legislation as a NIM even when it has only a superficial connection to the EU directive, I excluded such legislation whenever it was possible to detect this. The procedure resulted in a total of 952 observations (119 directives in 8 member states). Table 1 presents the distribution of the dependent variable. --------------------------

Independent variables

The hypotheses presented in the theory feature both properties of the individual directives and preference-based and institutional attributes of the political and administrative systems of the member states.

The data related to the traits of the EU directives were again taken from the CELEX database. The relation of a law to EU trade was considered to be direct and significant if a directive's subject matter included 'technical barriers'. The information was coded from the CELEX subject matter descriptors field. 7 An alternative measure based on the CELEX directory classification was also constructed: legislation concerning the Internal Market, Competition and the Free Movement of Goods, Services and Capital (categories 2, 6, 8, 10 and 13) was grouped into one category, and all the rest into another. The results using this measure were largely the same as from using the 'technical barriers', so results based on only one indicator (technical barriers) are reported. The coding of the remaining policy sectors was also based on the CELEX database and follows the 'classification heading' field. The environment sector (category 15) is usually considered to involve the most costly legislation and it is therefore included in the model estimation.

The political complexity of legislation was measured by the number of recitals. Recitals [START_REF] Kaeding | Determinants of Transposition Delay in the European Union[END_REF] precede the body of a directive and give the reasons for the contents of the enacting terms (i.e. the articles). A large number of recitals indicates that the directive has an extensive scope, as well as addressing a high number of important issues. The number of recitals is also positively related to the salience of a directive. Implementing legislation implies low political complexity because it usually specifies, adapts and updates a legislative framework laid down by general directives adopted by the Council, or by the Council and the European Parliament.

The measurement of implementing legislation is straightforward. Directives adopted by the Commission are implementing (delegated) legislation . As such, Commission directives tend to be of less importance and scope (salience) than general directives.

The next set of variables stem from features of the political and administrative systems of the member states. Four measures are preference based. Government preferences towards European integration as well as positions on a socioeconomic left/right scale are computed on the basis of the data provided by the 'Party Policy in Modern Democracies' project [START_REF] Benoit | Party Policy in Modern Democracies[END_REF]. For coalition governments, the positions were calculated by weighting the score for each party participating in the government by its share of votes in the parliament relative to the remaining parties. For example, for a two-party government with one partner holding 30% of the seats and the other 20% of the seats of the legislation, the position of the first party will be weighted by a factor of 3/5 and that of the second by 2/5, and the two scores will be added to form the total score for the government. Generally, the available data covered all relevant parties, with two exceptions -for one of the missing parties, a measure was imputed using the Chapel Hill expert survey on party positions [START_REF] Marks | Party Competition and European Integration in East and West. Different Structure, Same Causality[END_REF].

The party position data provide the basis for the computation of distance measures to test the government capacity argument as well. The preference distance was again measured in relation to two dimensions -EU integration and general left/right position. The measure simply tracks the maximum possible distance between a pair of two coalition partners in government.

The data on the composition of governments in the CEE countries needed for the construction of the government preferences and ideological distances data stemmed primarily from the European Journal of Political Research annual country reports (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006) and were checked and complemented by other sources. Once collected, the data allow for a straightforward measure of the number of parties in government as well.

The measures of administrative effectiveness and regulatory quality are based on the World Bank Governance Indicators [START_REF] Kaufman | Governance Matters IV. Governance Indicators for 1996-2004[END_REF]. 'Government effectiveness' measures the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government's commitment to such policies. 'Regulatory quality' measures the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development. All the preference-based and country-specific variables are averaged for the three years prior to the transposition of each directive and are, thus, directive specific. For directives not implemented within the deadline, an average score covering the entire span of the study (1999-2004/5) was computed.

Analysis

Because the dependent variable is binary, a binomial logistic regression is employed as the method of analysis. The model estimates the probability of a successful (on-time) transposition given a combination of values of the independent variables. The probability of success given a combination of explanatory variables is transformed into the odds of success (how often success happens relative to failure) and then the log of the odds (logit) is taken so that the function has a range from -ϱ to + ϱ. The model is estimated using the Design and GLM packages for fitting generalized linear models in R. An estimation using the MLlibrary package was also performed, yielding practically the same results. The Huber-White method was used to adjust the variance-covariance matrix to correct for heteroscedasticity and for correlated responses from cluster samples.

Table 2 reports the results of the model estimation. Two models were used, with Model 2 incorporating two interaction effects in addition to the base Model 1. A positive sign of the coefficients indicates that higher values on the independent variable increase the probability of a timely transposition. Negative values show that the factors decrease the chances a directive will be transposed within the deadline.

Surprisingly, implementing legislation is less likely to be transposed on time than regular directives. Commission directives are usually considered to be of lesser importance, specifying or updating a regulatory framework already laid down elsewhere. The negative relationship can perhaps be explained by the candidate countries focusing on the more substantially important legislation and leaving the Commission directives to be dealt with later. Political complexity shows a slight negative effect but the coefficient is not significant, indicating that the relationship might be due to chance.

The measures of government preferences have the expected signs and are statistically significant. Legislation is more likely to be transposed within the deadline if in the previous three years governments with higher support for European integration have been in power. Similarly, governments leaning towards the right on a left/right socioeconomic dimension are more likely to complete the transposition of EU legislation on time.

The measures for administrative effectiveness and regulatory quality are highly correlated and cannot be used in the same model. The reported results are based on the 'regulatory quality' measure (the results using 'administrative effectiveness' are essentially the same). The effect of this variable is positive and significant. Legislation is more likely to be transposed in countries with higher regulatory quality (measured through an average over the three years preceding the event).

The impact of government capacity depends on the precise conceptualization used. When using the preference distance measures (over the left/right and the EU dimensions), the effects are not significantly different from zero (not reported). On the other hand, a model including the number of parties in government returns a strong negative and statistically significant relationship between the number of parties in government and the probability that EU legislation will be transposed on time. Turning to the sectoral differences in transposition performance, Internal Market legislation is significantly more likely to be transposed within the deadlines. Measured by a binary variable marking the policy sector and by the presence of 'technical barriers' in the directive's subject (the measure reported in the model), the effect is positive and substantial. On the other hand, in line with the hypothesis, environmental legislation, being the most costly, is less likely to have been transposed on time. Two other policy sectors included as controls -transport and social policy -are not significantly different from the total pool of directives.

In Model 2, some of the more subtle implications of the theoretical arguments are explored. The multi-level structure of the data allows different interaction effects to be estimated. The paper tests two interaction effects that are especially relevant for the major claims of this paper. Since socioeconomic left/right positions are expected to have an effect because governments positioned towards the right end of the spectrum should be more supportive of trade liberalization and the retreat of the state from the economy (relative to left parties), the effect of the variable should be greater for the subset of Internal Market legislation. The positive sign and statistical significance of the interaction term between the left/right positions and Internal Market legislation in Model 2 support this conjecture.

Government support for EU accession should have the strongest impact on legislation that is politically complex. The transposition of noncontroversial directives dealing with trivial matters should be less affected by the pro-European attitudes of governments than is politically complex legislation with wide implications. Precisely in these cases the willingness of a government to forgo its own policy preferences owing to its overall support for EU accession will result in a decrease in the negative effect of political complexity on the likelihood of a timely transposition. The positive sign of the second interaction term in Model 2 yields support for this interpretation.

The direction and significance of most of the effects are in line with the hypotheses presented in the theory section. However, it is instructive to look also at the size of the effects and to examine how much of a difference they make to the probability of timely transposition. First of all, the range of the predicted probabilities on the basis of Model 1 ranges from .34 to .94, highlighting that, even in the case of a combination of explanatory variables most unfavourable for timely transposition, a directive still has a substantial chance of being transposed within the deadline. A regular directive with an average number of recitals during a two-party government and having mean scores on the EU and left/right dimension has a probability of 86% to be transposed on time if it is related to trade. The probability drops to 68% if instead the directive is part of the environment field and is 79% for the rest.

Figure 3 plots the predicted probabilities for Internal Market and environment directives being transposed on time for a different combination of parties in government and values on the socioeconomic left/right dimensions, ranging from the observed minimum to the observed maximum. The figure illustrates the joint effects of government type and preferences and policy sectors. For example, Internal Market legislation is in general more likely to be transposed on time than environmental legislation. However, under a four-party government, Internal Market laws are less likely to be incorporated within the deadlines in comparison with environmental laws in a country governed by a one-party cabinet. Further, directives have a better chance of being transposed on time by a coalition government that strongly supports EU integration than by a single-party cabinet that only moderately supports the EU. The plot provides a clear representation of the changing probabilities of timely transposition, but it should be handled with care because some combinations of the variables might not have been observed in the actual data.

Another useful way to assess the magnitude of the effect of the explanatory variables is to calculate the odds ratios. The odds ratio can be interpreted as the change in the expected odds of success (on-time transposition) as the value of one variable changes while holding the other factors constant. 8 The right-most column of Table 2 presents the change in the expected odds of timely transposition for the variables of main interest (the calculation is based on Model 1). Values between 0 and 1 indicate a decrease in the expected odds, and values above 1 show higher odds of a transposition within the deadline. For example, the odds of implementing legislation being transposed on time are 0.70 smaller than of regular directives. Ten more recitals provide odds that are 0.81 times smaller for successful transposition. The odds of directives related to technical barriers are 1.63 times larger, whereas environmental directives have 0.59 smaller odds of being transposed on time. A change of one point on the EU accession support scale (the original scale ranges from 1 to 20) brings 1.66 greater odds and a 1 point change to the right on the socioeconomic dimension brings 1.32 greater odds. Clearly, the relative effect of the European dimension is bigger. The impact of regulatory quality is small, with 0.1 change in the value of this indicator (the observed range in the data is 0.6) bringing 1.15 greater odds of success. Overall, the size of the effects is not exceptionally large, but a change in some of the explanatory variables still brings substantial increases/decreases in the probability of timely transposition. As expected, some of these variables are directive related, some of them capture policy-specific influences and yet others depict features of the different candidate countries.

Conclusion

The results of the empirical analysis presented in this paper paint a complex picture of transposition in the CEE during enlargement. Pro-European and right-wing governments have been beneficial for timely transposition. In some respects this finding is in line with intuitions and existing theories of compliance. On the other hand, it dismisses the picture of EU law adoption being a purely administrative and technical exercise. All countries might have been willing to transpose the acquis, but those ruled by governments supportive of the EU and liberalization have done better. Government preferences have been translated to some extent into the varying outcomes of transposition. Moreover, the party position effects are stronger exactly where expected: in the Internal Market sector for left/right positions, and in politically complex legislation for European integration positions.

The positive effect of pro-Europe government attitudes is quite interesting in light of the lack of a relationship (or rather the inverse relationship) between support for European integration and transposition performance in the 'old' member states (see [START_REF] Lampinen | Implementation Deficit -Why Member States Do Not Comply with EU Directives?[END_REF][START_REF] Mbaye | Why National States Comply with Supranational Law: Explaining Implementation. Infringements in the European Union, 1972-1993[END_REF]. The effect could well be specific to the enlargement period: a pro-Europe stance is directly related to how susceptible governments are to the lure of accession and the pressure of conditionality. The less supportive of integration that CEE governments have been, the fewer efforts and resources they seem to have put into meeting the transposition requirements. It is rather likely that overall success in terms of transposition is a result of the generally very high support for integration expressed by the governing parties in CEE during enlargement. Even the least EU-supportive governments ruling in Hungary (until 2002) and Poland (until 2001) have shown enough commitment to European integration to proceed with the incorporation of EU law, although at a slower pace than their more EU-supportive counterparts.

The capacity and capability of governments also appear influential on the basis of the data analysis. In line with the existing literature, regulatory quality has a positive effect on transposition performance, although the magnitude of the effect is not great. A greater number of parties in government seems to limit the capability of countries to transpose faster. On the other hand, measures of preference distance proved to have no explanatory value. The influence of regulatory quality, however, might to some extent be spurious and reflect the effect of time. With a few exceptions, such as the Czech Republic in 2003 and Poland in 2001, administrative efficiency and regulatory quality in the region improve in all countries over the analysed time period. At the same time, transposition is more likely as the date of accession approaches. As a result, the measures of public administration quality are to some extent collinear with time, leading to a potentially inflated size of the effect. Nevertheless, this paper brings some tentative evidence that regulatory quality has had a positive effect on the speed of transposition -a finding in line with previous research [START_REF] Hille | It's the Bureaucracy, Stupid": The Implementation of the Acquis Communautaire in EU Candidate Countries, 1999-2003[END_REF][START_REF] Toshkov | Transposition of EU Social Policy in the New Member-States[END_REF]. Further theoretical and empirical research would have to address the possible subtle interaction between preferences and capability.

Even minor delays in adopting the EU legislation in the new member states might have important consequences for the economies and societies in the EU. The sectoral differences in transposition rates are important because they might lead to asymmetric adaptation in CEE. As areas of negative integration, such as the Internal Market, adapt faster to EU rules, whereas areas of positive integration such as environment lag behind, the marketcorrecting efforts of the EU might fail to compensate for some of the negative side-effects of European integration. Clearly, delays in transposing and implementing the European nature protection legislation imply potential threats to the environment in the new member states. More importantly, companies and business projects in a country incorporating the EU rules belatedly enjoy a comparative advantage, because they do not have to carry the burden of the impact assessments demanded by the EU nature protection directives.

A direct form of conditionality related to opening trade (working separately from the grand conditionality of access to full accession) might be responsible for the observed swifter transposition of trade-related measures. Interpretation of the effect of trade, however, should be treated with care, because it does not capture cross-country or temporal variation but differentiates essentially between policy sectors and types of legislation. Transposition of trade-related directives is 'negative' integration in the sense of removing existing barriers rather than applying a new regulatory regime. In this regard, it is interesting to note the growing acceptance of EU rules and standards even beyond the borders of the EU and the candidate countries. 9 Despite the importance of explaining the complex variation in the data, the big picture of timely and relatively successful transposition of EU directives in CEE during the period of enlargement should also be kept in mind. As the data indicate, even directives subject to the most unfavourable conditions have had a substantial chance of being processed within the deadline. It is an interesting question whether the drives behind transposition performance have fundamentally changed now that the enlargement period is over. Further studies will have to assess how durable and how special the embrace of EU law by the former communist EU members really is.

Notes 1

In contrast to previous enlargements, when some countries were given a period of adaptation to the acquis during which full transposition and implementation were in practice not expected and infringement procedures were started against the newly acceded members only after several years, in the case of the Eastern Enlargement there was almost no leeway for the application of the legislation. The first infringement procedures in regard to the new members came within six months of accession. 2 A note on terminology: transposition is the process of formal adoption of rules and regulations that adapt the national legislation to the norms of European directives; implementation is a broader process that includes the formal legal aspects (transposition) as well as the practical application of the rules; compliance, defined as acting in accordance with certain standards, is broadly synonymous with implementation but emphasizes the exogenous source of the rules to be complied with. The current study deals primarily with transposition, or the formal legal aspects of compliance.

3

Over recent years, a multitude of theories and causal mechanisms have been proposed (and tested) in studies of transposition, implementation and compliance in the EU. Nevertheless, most of the analyses focus on and explore the influence of specific variables. The studies by [START_REF] Steunenberg | Turning Swift Policy-Making into Deadlock and Delay: National Policy Coordination and the Transposition of EU Directives[END_REF][START_REF] Steunenberg | A Policy Solution to the European Union's Transposition Puzzle: Interaction of Interests in Different Domestic Arenas[END_REF] are examples of the very few advances that have been made towards revealing the micro-foundations of compliance in the EU. 4

For other ways to capture the effect of administrative efficiency and reform, see [START_REF] Borghetto | Complying with the Transposition Deadlines of EU Directives: Evidence from Italy[END_REF]. Coordination problems are analysed by [START_REF] Mastenbroek | Surviving the Deadline. The Transposition of EU Directives in the Netherlands[END_REF]. The effect of parliamentary scrutiny is investigated by [START_REF] Berglund | Mass Production of Law. Routinization in Transposition of European Directives. A Sociological-Institutionalist Account[END_REF] and the effect of administrative oversight mechanisms by [START_REF] Jensen | Implementing Europe: A Question of Oversight[END_REF]. Administrative capability in EU affairs might increase with the length of membership [START_REF] Haverland | Do Member States Make European Policies Work? Analysing the EU Transposition Deficit[END_REF]. 5

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this point. 6

The reasons for preferring a dichotomous measure instead of a durationdependent variable are related to the problems of establishing a valid starting date when the directives become 'at risk' of being transposed for all cases, the level of measurement precision, and the related fact that a large percentage of the directives are transposed in a single period of observation, which creates problems for duration statistical models. Nevertheless, a duration analysis of the data has been performed (using Cox proportional hazards), and the results are to a very large degree consistent with the results of the logistic regression analysis presented below. 7

An alphabetically structured list of over 200 keywords based on the subdivisions of the treaties and the areas of activity of the institutions providing a general overview of the content of the document. 8

For a change of δ in the values of the variable x, the odds are expected to change by a factor of exp(β x ϫ δ), holding all other variables constant. β x is the estimated coefficient for the effect of x from the logistic regression model (Scott Long, 1997: 80). 9

See the speech by the EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, 'Openness, Trade and the European Union', Chambre de Commerce et de l'Industrie de Paris, Paris, 30 June 2007, as well as the article 'Brussels Rules OK', The Economist, 20 September 2007.

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 Transposition of a sample of 119 directives in CEE over time.

  variable: probability of on-time transposition. N = 952. * significant at 10%, **significant at 5%, *** significant at 1%, two-sided tests.

Figure 3

 3 Figure 3 Socio-economic left/right government positions and the probability of timely transposition.

Table 1

 1 Distribution of the dependent variable (timely transposition)

	Deadline May 2004	Deadline after May 2004
	-

Table 2

 2 Explaining on-time transposition: a logistic regression model

European Union Politics 9(3)

Toshkov Embracing European Law


Claes H De Vreese

Hajo G Boomgaarden

Holli A Semetko

Hard and Soft Public Support for Turkish Membership in the EU

Support for European integration is a function no longer only of 'hard' economic and utilitarian predictors but also of 'soft' predictors such as feelings of identity and attitudes towards immigrants. Focusing on the issue of the potential membership of Turkey in the European Union (EU), this study demonstrates that the importance of 'soft' predictors outweighs the role of 'hard' predictors in understanding public opinion about Turkish membership. The study draws on survey data (N = 1630) and applies a series of regression models and structural equation modelling to show in addition how the effects of utilitarian considerations are mediated through 'soft' indicators, further accentuating the importance of identity considerations and anti-immigration sentiments. The findings are discussed in the light of public support for and the legitimacy of further European enlargement.

In a nutshell, explanations of support for European integration have developed from a focus on primarily 'hard' economic and utilitarian predictors to 'soft' predictors such as feelings of identity and attitudes towards immigrants. During the initial years of European collaboration, 'permissive consensus' was dominant and there was little interest in public opinion and in understanding public support for integration. Later, variation in public support was largely seen as a function of utilitarian and cost/benefit considerations [START_REF] Gabel | Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories[END_REF]. With the progress of integration and the decline of public support, there has been an increasing awareness of 'soft' predictors for understanding (a lack of) support. Feelings of identity [START_REF] Hooghe | Calculation, Community and Cues: Public Opinion on European Integration[END_REF][START_REF] Mclaren | Public Support for the European Union: Cost/Benefit Analysis or Perceived Cultural Threat?[END_REF] and fear of immigration (De [START_REF] Vreese | Projecting EU Referendums: Fear of Immigration and Support for European Integration[END_REF] have become parts of the explanations of public opinion.

On the topic of the potential membership of Turkey in the EU, both sets of considerations conceivably play a role. The issue has been framed by political elites and the media as both an economic issue (e.g. labour migration, subsidies going to Turkey) and an issue of European identity, safety and values (De Vreese et al., 2006;[START_REF] Koenig | Media Framing of the Issue of Turkish Accession to the EU. A European or National Process?[END_REF]. We hypothesize that 'soft' considerations will be of greater importance for understanding variation in public support for Turkish membership. We also assume that the impacts of utilitarian considerations are indirect and mediated through immigrationrelated considerations. This has implications for future investigations of public support for the issue of Turkish membership in particular and European integration in general. The EU opened negotiations with Turkey in October 2005. These negotiations are ongoing and complicated. Public opinion is expected to be crucial for the negotiations because public acceptance of the negotiation outcome, either in the indirect form of parliamentary support or directly through public opinion or a referendum, is necessary.

EU support: From hard to soft predictors

The question of why some people embrace the notion of European integration whereas others oppose it has generated a considerable number of studies. Understanding variation has been explained in terms of cognitive mobilization (e.g. [START_REF] Inglehart | Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity[END_REF], utilitarian and economic considerations (e.g. [START_REF] Gabel | Understanding Variation in Public Support for European Integration[END_REF] and satisfaction with the incumbent government (e.g. [START_REF] Franklin | Referendum Outcome and Trust in Government: Public Support for Europe in the Wake of Maastricht[END_REF][START_REF] Ray | Reconsidering the Link between Incumbent Support and Pro-EU Opinion[END_REF], as well as sociodemographic characteristics and political-ideological preferences (e.g. [START_REF] Gabel | Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories[END_REF]. More recent explanations include feelings of national identity [START_REF] Christin | Joining the EU? Explaining Public Opinion in Switzerland[END_REF][START_REF] Hooghe | Calculation, Community and Cues: Public Opinion on European Integration[END_REF][START_REF] Marks | National Identity and Support for European Integration[END_REF], national pride and territorial identity [START_REF] Carey | Undivided Loyalties: Is National Identity an Obstacle to European Integration?[END_REF], perceived cultural threat [START_REF] Mclaren | Public Support for the European Union: Cost/Benefit Analysis or Perceived Cultural Threat?[END_REF] and fear of immigration (De [START_REF] Vreese | Projecting EU Referendums: Fear of Immigration and Support for European Integration[END_REF]. We briefly address each of these explanations and utilize most of these in our model for explaining support for Turkish membership in the EU.

Several studies have pointed to the relevance of 'hard', economic considerations for understanding support for the EU. Macroeconomics (such as inflation and unemployment) may matter (e.g. [START_REF] Eichenberg | Europeans and the European Community: The Dynamics of Public Support for European Integration[END_REF], but microeconomics, focusing on how some people benefit from European integration while others do not, have proven more important [START_REF] Gabel | Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories[END_REF]. In particular, the 'subjective utilitarian model' suggests that European integration is supported if perceptions and future evaluations of the economy are positive.

Extant research has also demonstrated that 'Euro-opinions' are to a considerable extent a product of citizens resorting to proxies when formulating their view on integration. These proxies typically stem from the national political arena [START_REF] Anderson | When in Doubt Use Proxies: Attitudes to Domestic Politics and Support for the EU[END_REF][START_REF] Franklin | Attitudes toward Europe and Referendum Votes: A Response to Siune and Svensson[END_REF]. In particular the importance of government approval of and support for incumbent political parties has been considered. When a pro-European government, for example, calls a referendum on an issue of European integration, supporters of that government are more likely to follow in favour of a pro-European proposition [START_REF] Franklin | Attitudes toward Europe and Referendum Votes: A Response to Siune and Svensson[END_REF][START_REF] Franklin | Referendum Outcome and Trust in Government: Public Support for Europe in the Wake of Maastricht[END_REF]. [START_REF] Inglehart | Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity[END_REF] proposed that citizens with higher levels of cognitive skills would be more at ease with a supranational entity. This was extended to suggest that those with a political value system favouring non-material values (such as self-fulfilment and concerns with democracy) above material values (such as financial security) would be more favourable towards European integration [START_REF] Inglehart | The Silent Revolution[END_REF]. Later analyses found only limited support for this idea, either by reducing the argument to the original member states only [START_REF] Anderson | Economic Benefits and Support for Membership in the European Union: A Cross-National Analysis[END_REF] or by controlling for a number of the explanations outlined here (e.g. [START_REF] Gabel | Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories[END_REF].

In recent years there has been an increasing scholarly interest in antecedents of attitudes towards European integration stemming from non-economic, non-party political preferences. This interest in 'soft' explanations co-occurs with at least two important developments. First, the nature of the 'European project' has changed in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty, which set out a path of far-reaching economic and also political cooperation, much of which took effect in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the same time, a growing number of citizens across Europe started to express reluctance about further integration, a change in public support later coined as Euroscepticism, which marked the end of the 'permissive consensus' during which most citizens seemed to (quietly) accept advances in integration decided by political elites. Indeed, the change in the (perceived) nature of the integration project has made several considerations applicable when understanding variation in support for EU issues. Citizens' feelings of national attachment and their perceptions of threats to the nation-state and to the nation's interests and cultural integrity have been shown to matter [START_REF] Kritzinger | The Influence of the Nation-State on Individual Support for the European Union[END_REF]. [START_REF] Marks | National Identity and Support for European Integration[END_REF] differentiate between cultural and economic threats and, when controlling for economic evaluations, find these to have a significant impact on EU support. [START_REF] Mclaren | Public Support for the European Union: Cost/Benefit Analysis or Perceived Cultural Threat?[END_REF] argues that reluctance about integration is a function of the perceived cultural threat and it has been shown how the perceived threat of immigration can fuel public anti-EU integration sentiments (De [START_REF] Vreese | Projecting EU Referendums: Fear of Immigration and Support for European Integration[END_REF].

In the case of potential Turkish membership of the EU, given the multifaceted nature of the issue, it can be expected that economic, utilitarian considerations apply as well as a number of questions concerning feelings of national identity and ways of thinking about foreigners. In a study on public attitudes towards Turkish membership, McLaren (2007) demonstrated how group interests outweigh economic self-interests when it comes to considering Turkish membership. This relationship is conditioned by context, more precisely by the threat of immigration, so that the group considerations weigh even more strongly in contexts with higher levels of immigration.

In this study, we corroborate previous work and suggest that the issue of Turkish membership shifts the emphasis of the ingredients of public opinion towards 'softer' identity-, threat-and immigration-related considerations. We extend this work by arguing that the impacts of 'harder' utilitarian considerations also partially operate through soft considerations. In technical terms, we expect a partial mediation effect (e.g. [START_REF] Baron | The Moderator-Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research: Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations[END_REF]) by which economic considerations operate both independently to shape public opinion and through the relationship with anti-immigration sentiments. We base this expectation of a mediated relationship on the extensive literature on anti-immigration attitudes, which demonstrates how negative economic evaluations fuel such sentiments and behaviour (e.g. [START_REF] Citrin | Public Opinion toward Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations[END_REF][START_REF] Quillian | Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Sniderman | The Outsider -Prejudice and Politics in Italy[END_REF][START_REF] Sniderman | Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrants Minorities[END_REF]

Hypotheses

Our first goal is to demonstrate that, on the issue of Turkish membership of the EU, which has implications in the realms of politics, economics and culture, we can expect many factors to matter for understanding the variation in public support. When reviewing established factors explaining support for the EU, a shift of emphasis from rather hard economic factors (e.g. [START_REF] Gabel | Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories[END_REF] to softer identity-related factors (e.g. [START_REF] Mclaren | Public Support for the European Union: Cost/Benefit Analysis or Perceived Cultural Threat?[END_REF][START_REF] Mclaren | Explaining Opposition to Turkish Membership of the EU[END_REF] is evident in the literature. Therefore, we explicitly expect the importance of 'soft' explanations to outweigh the importance of 'hard' explanations (Hypothesis 1). This expectation is augmented by the importance of feelings of identity and the relevance of immigration-related sentiments. Given that Turkey would become the largest member of the EU, individuals with non-inclusive feelings of identity are likely to oppose membership of an entity of this magnitude, and also because of religious considerations and perceived cultural incompatibility. Similarly, individuals who are reluctant about immigration are likely to oppose membership given the potential access of Turkish citizens to current EU member states.

Our second goal is to demonstrate that the effect of utilitarian considerations is partially mediated through anti-immigration sentiments (Hypothesis 2). We expect this to be the case on the basis of previous research and because (a) negative economic expectations are related to antiimmigration sentiments and (b) Turkey in the EU is seen as a vehicle for increased immigration.

Based on extant research, as outlined above, a positive relationship between support for Turkish membership and gender (male), age, education, income, knowledge and post-materialism should be provable. Individuals with a right-wing ideological preference should be less supportive of Turkish membership than individuals with a centrist ideological preference. We assume that support for Turkish EU membership is positively related to favourable evaluations of the incumbent government and positive evaluations of the economy. Economic evaluations and government support have been found to be interrelated [START_REF] Wearing | A Polity of the Edge: Canada and the Politics of Fragmentation[END_REF]. The power of these hard factors in support for further European integration is, as outlined above, well established in relation to both EU enlargements and various European policy areas. We finally test the impact of exclusive national identity and fear of immigration on support for Turkish membership and expect both to be negatively related to support. The last two predictors are considered 'soft' predictors. This makes sense in the light of the EU moving from being a more or less exclusively economic union to nowadays incorporating cultural and social policy.

The interest of this article is twofold. First, we seek to demonstrate the overriding importance of soft factors, replacing the explanatory value of hard factors, in EU support. Second, we argue that hard and socio-demographic factors have not become irrelevant in explanatory models, but that their influence on EU support is to a large degree mediated through the soft explanatory variables. We conclude that in modelling the factors influencing EU support we need to take into account soft factors and to realize that modelling is maybe less straightforward than it is usually presented.

Methods

To test our hypotheses while adequately controlling for other influences, we cannot rely on the most readily available data (the Eurobarometer) because a number of the key concepts are either not included in the barometer or poorly operationalized. EB 66 is the EB data set that comes closest to being appropriate since it contains questions about citizens' support for Turkey's enlargement of the EU and a number of other relevant measures. However, it does not include key variables tapping post-materialism or government support, and it includes only one inadequate question on immigration sentiments. We therefore collected new data to test the antecedents of public support for Turkish EU membership, the importance of 'soft' versus 'hard' predictors and their mediated influences. The trade-off is that we can focus on one country only. Our study was conducted in the Netherlands against the backdrop of an EU Council summit in December 2004. Here, leaders of the European Union met to discuss whether Turkey met the political criteria that were set out as preconditions for entry to the EU and to agree upon a date to start negotiation talks. 1 The survey was fielded four weeks before the summit. 2 A net sample of 1630 respondents participated, which produced a response rate, computed according to AAPOR definition Response Rate 1, of .74. The survey was webadministered and respondents were drawn from a representative database of approximately 55,000 members of the Dutch population. The database reflects the Dutch population, with computers and Internet access being provided to non-computer owners. Correspondence between our sample and population data from the Central Bureau of Statistics for a number of sociodemographic variables, such as age, gender and education, is satisfactory. Descriptive information regarding the sociodemographic composition of the sample is provided in Table 3 in the Appendix.

The dependent variable is attitude towards Turkish EU membership, measured by asking respondents 'How do you think about possible membership of Turkey in the European Union?' Answers were given on a five-point scale ranging from 'very negative' to 'very positive'. 3 The independent variables include gender (1 = female), age (in years), education (coded into six categories ranging from low to high) and household income (coded into four categories running from low to high). Further, we measured ideological preferences (dummies for left and right, with middle as reference category), support for post-materialist values (materialist low, post-materialist high) and political sophistication (a weighted additive index of political knowledge and political interest). We included questions tapping evaluations of the economy and the government (five-point scales, with high being positive) and whether respondents held an exclusive Dutch identity (dummy), and we used a sixitem measure for anti-immigration sentiment. Question wordings, means and standard deviations (SD) for all items, as well as scale reliabilities, are reported in Table A1 in the Appendix. The range of all variables was standardized and we report unstandardized coefficients.

Data analysis

Our first interest is to assess the relative contribution of 'hard' versus 'soft' predictors of support for Turkish EU enlargement. To test our hypothesis we employ a series of regression models successively adding new explanatory variables, thereby assessing the explanatory value of each of the models and the improvement of the model when introducing new variables. We report the percentage of variance explained for each model and test for the significance of increases in explained variance. The first model (A) accounts for sociodemographic predictors, and the second model (B) adds 'traditional' explanations such as ideology and political sophistication. The third model (C) then accounts for 'hard' explanations such as economic evaluations and an assessment of the incumbent government. For a comparison of the explained variance, the fourth model (D) includes, alongside sociodemographic and traditional explanations, only 'soft' explanations such as holding post-materialist values and an exclusive national identity and attitudes towards immigration. The final model (E) includes all established predictors and allows a comparison of the contribution of the different variables to the explained variance in support.

Our second assumption is that the effects of sociodemographic, traditional and hard predictors are, at least partly, mediated by the more recent soft factors. We assess this by using structural equation modelling. The model that is presented reflects the theoretical considerations outlined above and was computed using Amos 5.0. To assess the model fit, we report the comparative fit index (CFI), the parsimony-adjusted comparative fit index (PCFI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA). 4

Results

First, we look at the importance of more recent soft explanatory factors of EU support compared with the more established traditional and hard factors. We start with a very simple model incorporating only sociodemographic variables as explanatory factors for supporting Turkish accession to the EU (Table 1, Model A). As expected, education has a strongly significant positive --------------------------------------------- influence on public support, with those who are more highly educated being more likely to support Turkish EU accession. Furthermore, also in line with our expectations, we find men to be more supportive than women. Age and income are not substantially related to support. The explanatory power of the model is very low, explaining only 1.4% of the variation in the dependent variable.

In the second model (Table 1, Model B), we add political sophistication and ideology. Whereas the former shows no relationship with the dependent variable, a right-wing ideological outlook in particular has a strong and negative influence on support for Turkish accession. Left ideology has only a marginal but positive impact on support. Including these measures somewhat reduces the impact of education, and income becomes a marginally significant predictor. The explanatory power of the model rises to almost 6%, which is significant but still not impressive. The traditional explanatory factors do not exercise strong influences and do not perform well in explaining support for Turkish EU membership.

In the next model (Table 1, Model C) we add government assessments and evaluations of the economy as so-called 'hard' predictors to the model. It becomes evident that economic evaluations are by far the most important of the newly added variables in the model, with people having a positive evaluation of the economy being more likely to support Turkish EU accession. Government evaluations contribute somewhat strongly as an explanatory factor, with people thinking well of the government being more supportive. The most important predictor in the model, however, remains right-wing ideology. Including the hard variables further decreases the impact of education, and renders income insignificant again. The explanatory power of the model rises significantly to almost 10%.

In the next step (Table 1, Model D) we test the impact of the soft factors, but leaving out the hard factors of government and economic evaluations. First, we note that the explanatory power of the model now significantly increases to 22%, thereby performing substantially better than the previous model(s). Anti-immigration attitudes far exceed the power of any other variable in the model. People who think negatively about immigrants and immigration are much more likely to oppose Turkish accession to the EU. However, holding an exclusive Dutch identity is also a strong negative predictor of support. Including these variables substantially decreases the impact of right-wing ideology, which, however, is still a significant negative factor. The last two steps in the model-building process tentatively suggest that the direct effects of variables such as education, income and ideology are at least partly mediated through evaluations of the economy and anti-immigration attitudes.

We now turn towards a test of the full model incorporating all independent variables (Table 1, Model E). Clearly, anti-immigration attitudes, holding an exclusive national identity and economic evaluations turn out to be the strongest explanatory factors in the model. Right-wing ideology and to a lesser degree government evaluations and post-materialism are significant factors explaining support for Turkish EU accession. Interestingly though, adding economic and government evaluations to the previous model (Model D) raises the explanatory power of the model by only 2%, to approximately 24%. In contrast, adding the soft predictors to the hard model (Model C) caused a rise of 14% in explained variance. This is a strong indication that the soft factors are considerably stronger predictors of support. 5 One might suspect that this strong effect of anti-immigration sentiments is owing to the fact that we employ support for Turkish membership in the EU as dependent variable, which is a policy where identity and immigration concerns arguably play a stronger role. This concern is only partly relevant, though. When using a measure of general support for European integration as the dependent variable, we find the relationships shown here largely confirmed (see Table A2 in the Appendix). 6 Although economic and government evaluations play a stronger role in general EU support than for Turkish EU accession, we still find holding an exclusive national identity and antiimmigration attitudes to be the most important predictors of general support. Do these results indicate that the more traditional factors and hard variables are rather irrelevant for explaining EU support today? Not necessarily, since, as we argue here, their influence might be to a large degree mediated through the soft variables. We test this proposition by means of structural equation modelling techniques. Based on the results of the ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions, the theoretical considerations outlined above and a pragmatic model modification indication, we estimated the model shown in Figure 1 (only hard and soft factors shown here). We find that, similar to the regression models, only five of the measures have a significant influence on support: economic evaluations, exclusive national identity, post-materialism, right-wing ideology and -again the strongest predictor -anti-immigration sentiments. There are, however, also substantial relations between the different explanatory variables employed in the model. Rather than having a direct effect on support, government evaluations affect evaluations of the economy, which in turn influence support. Economic considerations, however, are also strongly related to anti-immigration sentiments, so that part of the impact of the hard factors is indeed mediated through the soft factor of antiimmigration sentiment. Furthermore, identity is a strong predictor of anti-immigration sentiments, but at the same time is strongly related directly to support. Besides right-wing ideology, none of the traditional variables shows a direct effect on support in the full model.

So did, for instance, education become irrelevant in explanations of EU support? The list of effects shown in Table 2 confirms that some of the hypothesized direct effects were refuted by the OLS analysis, because they are mediated through other variables. We focus here on those variables that do not have a direct effect on support, but that are shown to have an indirect effect, mediated through other variables. For instance, whereas left-wing ideology has no direct effect on support for Turkish EU accession, its effect is mediated through a range of other factors, in particular identity, immigration attitudes and post-materialism, which yield a considerable total effect of left identity. Similarly, traditional accounts explaining EU support emphasize the role of education and, when considering total effects, education is positively related to support. Its influence, however, is again mediated through, in particular, anti-immigration sentiments and national identity. Whereas rightwing ideology still has a direct effect on support, a substantial part of its total effect is also mediated through anti-immigration concerns. In sum, traditional factors do still matter, but to a substantial degree their impact is mediated by the soft variables.

Discussion

Public opinion on European integration has become salient for both the research and the political agendas in recent years. Following the No outcomes of two referendums on the EU Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands and a general increase in Euroscepticism across Europe (see Hooghe and Marks, 2007), there is increased interest in understanding the antecedents of support for and scepticism about advanced integration. In the literature, multiple explanations of public support coexist. The relevance of different predictors has changed over time as the European integration project itself has changed. This observation is shared by recent analyses of European public opinion that have also stressed a variety of explanations rooted in feelings of identity, perceived cultural threat and fear of immigration (see [START_REF] Marks | National Identity and Support for European Integration[END_REF]. This study takes as its starting point the development from 'hard' predictors of support, such as utilitarian considerations and economic expectations [START_REF] Gabel | Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories[END_REF], to 'soft' predictors in the realm of cultural and identity-based considerations. The article focuses on one of the most contentious issues in contemporary Europe, the possible membership of Turkey in the EU. This issue is particularly interesting because it touches on economic, political and cultural dimensions. We specified and tested different models for explaining variation in support. The first model, including structural sociodemographic variables and 'early contenders' for explaining support (including Inglehart's sophistication and post-materialism theses), confirmed our expectations based on previous research but explained only a negligible share of variance. The inclusion of ideology indicated a particular negative effect of right-wing ideology on support for Turkish membership. Including 'hard' predictors such as economic expectations improved our model, but it was the inclusion of 'soft' predictors such as feelings of identity and anti-immigration attitudes that contributed most to explaining variation. Moreover, our study demonstrated how the importance of economic considerations is partially mediated by considerations with reference to immigration. These findings point to the increased importance of soft predictors, and also demonstrate that, in relation to an issue that touches on economic, political, and social and cultural dimensions, the latter outweigh the first in terms of importance for understanding public opinion. These are important lessons to learn for the progress of European integration, where public support is a necessity for the legitimacy of the project. That said, we acknowledge the single-country limitation and the salience of immigration and integration issues in this country (see Hooghe et al., 2007).

Our study also found a negative, stable and significant effect of political sophistication on support for Turkish membership. Political knowledge is an important but ambiguous part of the equation. [START_REF] Inglehart | Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity[END_REF] suggested that those with greater political skills were more likely to support European integration (see also [START_REF] Anderson | When in Doubt Use Proxies: Attitudes to Domestic Politics and Support for the EU[END_REF]. However, our finding is at odds with the 'cognitive mobilization' hypothesis as put forward by Inglehart. We suggest that the straightforward relationship between political sophistication and EU support is no longer applicable (see also [START_REF] Karp | To Know It Is to Love It? Satisfaction with Democracy in the European Union[END_REF]. Indeed political sophistication may foster a greater awareness of the qualities of the EU and, even though general knowledge about the EU is low, it might be the case that those with some knowledge are less satisfied with or supportive of European integration. In the case of support for European democracy, [START_REF] Karp | To Know It Is to Love It? Satisfaction with Democracy in the European Union[END_REF] offer an explanation for why this might be the case: political sophisticates may know that the European Parliament is not analogous to their national parliament and they might be more aware of and concerned about questions of accountability and system responsiveness. On the issue of Turkey, it might be the case that, as knowledge grows, evaluations of the future plans of the EU are more strongly rooted in the past performance of the EU, which might not always be seen as a good performance.

We consider our study to be a modest but important addition not just to our understanding of public opinion on European integration. It also provides the baseline knowledge needed to understand what drives changes in public support. Here we are well advised to turn also to the role of the political elites and the media and their framing of the issue. As has been shown, media coverage can lead to shifts in public support (De Vreese and Boomgaarden, 2006). Given the importance of considerations such as identity and sentiments vis-à-vis foreigners, we need to take a broader view when analysing media content in order to understand change in public support. News coverage both of the economy and of immigration and integration issues can be part of the answer in addition to real world developments. Finally, we point to the necessity to include more and better indicators in surveys aimed at understanding public opinion about Europe. Our study comes with the advantage of including most relevant indicators but at the price of investigating the relationships in one country only.

Notes

We acknowledge support from ASCoR and Emory University for this study.

1

The start of negotiations was a highly contested issue. The EU summit had to be prolonged to reach agreement, whereby it was decided to start negotiations on 3 October 2005. To counter concerns about a pre-set outcome of the negotiations (namely the rather 'automatic' accession of Turkey in the end), a clause was added stating that the outcome of the negotiations was open and would not necessarily lead to the accession of Turkey. 2

The specific fieldwork days were 14-18 November. 3

Our dependent variable was chosen after analysis of data collected among a separate sample (n = 45) in which a six-item index tapping support for Turkish membership was employed. The six items formed a reliable scale (alpha = .75) but, more importantly, the item used as a dependent variable in this study performed virtually identically (in terms of means and distribution) compared with the index. Given that all components of the index also correlated positively with the general item, we, for obvious reasons of space and financial constraints, utilized the general single item in this study. 4 [START_REF] Byrne | Structural Equation Modeling with AMOS Basic Concepts, Applications, and Programming[END_REF] [START_REF] Hair | Multivariate Data Analysis[END_REF]. PCLOSE indicates the probability that the RMSEA value is below .05. 5

What happens if we include only attitudinal variables in the model? This exploratory analysis shows that using economic evaluations, postmaterialism, anti-immigration attitudes and government evaluations yields an only marginally worse model than the complete one discussed previously, with an explained variance of 21%. In this model, government evaluations turn out to be a non-significant variable. Further, a model including only anti-immigration sentiments and economic evaluations still yields 21% explained variance. Again, the impact of anti-immigration attitudes is about three times as strong as the impact of economic evaluations, pointing towards the strong relevance of including this soft factor in explanatory models of EU support. 6 The correlation between general EU support and support for Turkish accession is r = .41, p < .01. If general EU support is entered as a control variable in the regression models explaining support for Turkey in the EU, the explanatory value of the models increases; however, the effects of the variables of interest remain stable.

  entries are unstandardized B coefficients (variable range standardized) and standard errors.

Figure 1

 1 Figure1Hard and soft factors influencing support for Turkish EU members.

Table 1

 1 Explaining support for Turkish EU membership

Table 2

 2 Direct, indirect and total effects for Turkish membership in the EU

	5 2 2	European Union Politics 9(4)
			Direct effects	Indirect effects Total effects
		Gender (female)	.00	-.05	-.05
		Age	.00	-.00	-.00
		Education	.00	.08	.08
		Income	.00	.04	.04
		Political sophistication	.00	-.04	-.04
		Ideology left	.00	.08	.08
		Ideology right	-.08	-.08	-.17
		Government evaluations	.00	-.06	-.06
		Economic evaluations	.13	.04	.17
		Post-materialism	.06	.00	.06
		Anti-immigration attitudes	.37	.00	.37
		Exclusive Dutch identity	-.12	-.07	-.19

  advises cut-off values of .90 for the CFI and .50 for the index considering parsimony; i.e. values below .90 and .50, respectively, indicate an insufficient model fit. An RMSEA below .05 indicates a good model fit and below .08 an acceptable fit

  Holli Semetko is Vice Provost and Director of the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning and Professor of Political Science at Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Fax: +1 404 727 2772 E-mail: holli.semetko@emory.edu

European Union Politics 9(4)