Abstract
The European Commission has considerable discretion over whether to investigate and prosecute European Union (EU) member states for violations of EU law. Is the Commission less likely to take action against a member state when there is more public opposition to the EU? In this paper, I assess how public support for the EU influences the behavior of the Commission across the EU’s three major noncompliance procedures: (1) the infringement procedure, (2) the state aid procedure, and (3) the technical regulations procedure. Using a collection of three new databases that capture all observable activity in these procedures, I find that, in the first two procedures, where the Commission has to consider the strategic behavior of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), public opposition to the EU deters the Commission from prosecuting potential violations of EU law, and that the magnitude of this effect varies by Directorate-General (DG), creating a noncompliance deficit that is systematically larger in some member states, and in some policy areas, than others.
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