The Role of Domestic Institutions in Making Policy Entrepreneurs Successful: An Analysis of the Transposition of the EU Late Payment Directive into French national law.

Graduation date: 2015Though research on EU law compliance is extensive, the question as to why some policy entrepreneurs are more successful than others, and why some countries comply better than others, remains largely disputed. Using a case study design of France, this thesis focuses on the type of domestic institutions that make EU member-states policy entrepreneurs successful in implementing the Late Payment EU Directive included in the finance component of the Small Business Act. I argue that, despite the fact that its president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was an active policy entrepreneur in crafting the EU Late Payment Directive, France’s semi-presidential system, which has strong checks and balances and therefore multiple veto players in the legislative process, limited the speed at which the President could adopt his own EU proposed policies. My results suggest that the structure of a country’s democratic system has important implication for the capacity of policy entrepreneurs to implement their own proposals