Hubert Smekal, in co-authorship with Robert Zbiral (Brno) and Sebastiaan Princen (Utrecht), has published an article in European Union Politics, one of the top journals on the European Union.
Their article on “Differentiation through flexibility in implementation: Strategic and substantive uses of discretion in EU directives” analyses the extent to which EU directives allow for variation in domestic implementation. Based on an original dataset of 164 directives adopted between 2006 and 2015, the authors find that the use of flexibility is associated more with efforts to accommodate differences between national policies (substantive use of discretion) than with attempts to facilitate the decision-making process in and between EU legislative institutions (strategic use of discretion).