Bureaucratic attitudes towards differentiated implementation: A comparison of attitudes towards differentiated implementation among Norwegian bureaucrats, citizens and politicians

The question of why the implementation of EU law differs across countries, in some cases leading to customization and in other cases non-compliance, has attracted increasing scholarly attention. However, we still know little about how bureaucrats, tasked with the implementation of EU law at the national level, think about the trade-off between legal certainty and potentially conflicting national interests. We also know little about how these views compare to those of politicians and citizens. Using a 2023 survey of all three groups, this study finds that, when controlling for demographic and ideological differences across the groups, bureaucrats, politicians and citizens have largely overlapping views when it comes to the trade-off between legal certainty and national interests. This suggests that one must look to factors other than attitudes, such as institutional cultures, to explain why bureaucrats act according to European, rather than national, interests.