In Capacity We Trust

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This dissertation draws on social capital as a different path to explain why some EU Member States comply with European law better than others. It systematically integrates the concept of social capital into the theoretical and empirical research on compliance with European law. The study develops an analytical framework through which the analysis and findings can be structured and compared. It explores if and how social capital affects compliance by Member States. Social capital has gained popularity in comparative politics and has been adopted by different groups of scholars working on collective action problems, while it has been mostly neglected in the compliance literature. The concept of social capital adds important values to compliance research as it introduces new solutions to the collective action problem oftentimes constituting non-compliance. Dissertation.