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Presentation of general findings of a study conducted in two German federal ministries concerning the transposition and implementation of European directives.

This paper proposes a theoretical concept that is appropriate to analyse and understand the role of the government bureaucracy in transposing European Union law. The theoretical concept is based on the assumption that both formal and informal structures of bureaucratic organisations have an impact on public decision making behaviour. On the basis of two recent theoretical approaches that will enable us to analyse both structural and informal features of government bureaucracies, namely the policy capacity concept and the administrative styles concept, I will propose a theoretical concept that combines elements of both approaches within one concept. The concept enables us ta analyse and understand the role of public administrations at the stage of implementation of public policies and derive hypotheses on the influence of administrative patterns of policy-making on transposing European Union law at the Member State level. The paper is part of my PhD-project "Financial Regulation and the Implementation of EU directives in the European Union Member States", which examines the administrative procedures at the Member State level in the transposition of directives. The theoretical concept presented is supposed to help us analyse and understand the impact of the government bureaucracy on the transposition of EU directives, especially with regard to the customisation of EU directives.