Department of Political and Social Sciences

The Berlin Infringement Database (BID) offers a unique and hands-on resource for researchers interested in questions of legal compliance. It allows for both cross-sectional and time-series testing of country-specific, sector-specific and legal act-specific determinants of compliance with EU legislation. At the time, the BID is the most comprehensive available database of its kind, containing 13.367 infringement cases covering the time span from 1978 to 2019. It starts with cases that have reached the reasoned opinion stage of the proceeding, the most recent reasoned opinion dating from 7 March 2019. Compared to the European Commission’s Infringement Decisions database, the BID combines older and newer cases within a single dataset, provides a more fine-grained hand-coded measurement of the type of violation, and matches the data on court referrals with the ECJ’s Curia database. The BID can be easily merged with member state-specific or legal act-specific covariates. The search tool allows to filter and export the data easily.

A detailed analysis and explanation of how and why noncompliance varies across time, member states, and policy sectors can be found in the book Why Noncompliance. The Politics of Law in the European Union, Cornell University Press, 2021.

Please cite the database as the following: 
Börzel, Tanja A. 2021. „Berlin Infringement Database“. Version 2021.1. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin.