Refining Our Research in Leuven
About the author: Benek Robertson ’20 is an FSI The Europe Center Undergraduate Intern at the Centre for European Policy and LICOS, in Brussels Belgium. Benek is currently a Political Science major at Stanford University.
Walking to work on a Friday, the market is already in full swing. I weave past smiling old couples picking out sandals. A summer camp of local boys donning matching white tees and green hats mills around the edge of the square. Though it is often overcast, today Leuven basks in a clear morning. Cream colored and intricate, the Gothic town hall stands above the busy streets. The concert stages for the town’s weekly summer concerts are being built up again for the occasion.
Leuven is the capital of Flemish Brabant, a province in Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch speaking region. Around three days a week, I commute to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) for work. This is the largest research university in Belgium, and its 50,000-plus students contribute to the energy of the setting. Working at the university-affiliated LICOS Centre has has enriched my understanding of Belgium. While much of Brussels is dominated by French language, Leuven speaks Dutch. I’m grateful for the chance to spend considerable time in both regions of Belgium; it’s an opportunity to see both sides of the nation’s cultural and linguistic divisions.
Working at LICOS has been a strong educational experience. Last week, I attended a workshop on human capital alongside LICOS employees. Over an afternoon, we heard and engaged with a diverse set of research projects, spanning topics such as quality of rural health care in China and the impacts of state Pre-K programs in the United States. Access to the presentations of top-class professors — presenters came from KU Leuven, Stanford, the Paris School of Economics, and the University of North Carolina — is such a privilege. This workshop stood out for the consistently through and nuanced research.
This exposure to varied research presentations is very useful for improving my own techniques. My work centers on the implementation of EU environmental policy. Understanding the factors that influence transposition — the process of individual states implementing European directives — helps track the effectiveness of the region’s supranational environmental legislation. I’m curious about both sides of the implementation picture: what different elements of each nation can better explain the strong environmental record of a country like Sweden or the resolutely coal-centered economy of a country like Poland? Tracing the policy implementation of each member state is not a small undertaking, and much of my time has been spent designing a research proposal and building a strong dataset.
To quantify national implementation effectiveness, we are drawing from the European Court of Justice’s infringement database, tracking the number of environmental violations over recent years. This metric is somewhat imperfect: these infractions represent a fraction of noncompliance with European law, and the commission relies in part on self-reporting from member-states, as well as interest groups, citizens, and companies. Reading the past literature on implementation effectiveness, there are some clear limitations to a large-scale study on infringement proceedings. In helping to design this project, it has been illuminating to think pragmatically about the effectiveness of certain types of dependent variables.
We settled on European Court of Justice data because past research has seen no systemic biases towards or against certain member states. Though somewhat constrained by the aforementioned factors, the data inspires enough confidence to move forward with these proceedings as a dependent variable.
I’ve spent my days alternating between reviewing literature and moving through through ten years of environmental cases in Excel to chart the violations of each EU country. It’s been very rewarding to construct data and refine my research idea into a testable question. It has also mandated a significant time commitment and attention to detail. But this university town is perfect for that; Leuven feels industrious but full of a youthful energy that drives me forward. Before taking the train back to Brussels, my coworkers and I sit in the cobbled cafes of the Old Market, listening to live music and enjoying a long summer evening. We’ll code the rest of these cases tomorrow.
