The Limits of Europeanisation. Domestic Constraints on Ownership Unbundling of National Electricity Systems

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,7, Maastricht University, language: English, abstract: While Bartle stresses that national institutions may protract the introduction of electricity reform, his research is on a more general level and does not explicitly focus on the costs of adaptation resulting from compensating losers of reform and convincing opposing political veto players. By doing so, important nuances of national responses to exogenous reform pressures may be overlooked. This thesis addresses this gap by asking the following research question: What explains the variation in unbundling regime choice between European countries after the Third Electricity Directive? The example of ownership unbundling provides a relevant empirical example to unequivocally comprehend the redistribution of resources resulting from a liberalisation reform initiative. When governments plan to unbundle VIUs, they directly interfere with the interests of several private and public actors. Thus, depending on the exact interest and governance configurations, full unbundling induces varying costs of compensation and (re-)negotiation for governments. I argue that an adaptation-cost-based account of member states' reform capacities allows us to obtain a better understanding of the pace and timing of electricity sector liberalisation in the EU as well as processes of Europeanisation more generally. The research question will be addressed through the lens of the rational-choice variant of Börzel & Risse's goodness-of-fit framework which is complemented by the historical institutionalist notion of path dependencies.