‘As time goes by’: Explaining the transposition of maritime directives 1 BERNARD STEUNENBERG 1 & MICHAEL KAEDING 2 1 Department of Public Administration, Leiden University, The Netherlands; 2 European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA), Maastricht, The Netherlands Abstract. The aim of this article is to explain the speed with which Member States transpose EC directives in the maritime sector. By discussing earlier work, the focus is on explanatory factors related to the contents of the directive that needs to be transposed and the context within which national transposition takes place. The authors’ expectations have been tested using data across seven Member States and 32 maritime directives. Using survival analysis based on Cox regression, several political-administrative and legal factors are identified that have an impact on the speed of transposition. The political sensitivity of the directive and the total number of national implementing measures lengthens the duration of transposition, while the degree of specialisation of the directive, the use of package law and experience speed up transposition. The authors also find that the impact of some of these explanatory factors changes over time. This underscores the importance of taking time seriously and to explore time dependency in further theoretical work on explaining policy-making processes. Introduction After any successful adoption of an European Commission (EC) directive, Member States need to start a process leading to the implementation of the new policy. Scholarly contributions assessing the implementation of European policy are numerous and still growing (see, e.g., the overviews of Falkner et al. 2005: 15; Mastenbroek & Kaeding 2006; Treib 2006). More recently, various quantitative studies have led to the identification of a number of variables, including characteristics of European policy and the domestic policy arena, that affect national transposition or national compliance with EC law. However, in explaining transposition, these studies view transposition as a particular event (i.e., transposition is ‘on time’ or ‘delayed’) and try to explain its occurrence.They pay little attention to the process of transposition and the question of whether time may influence the magnitude of the impact of various explanatory variables. A number of empirical studies suggest that time may matter in transposi- tion research. In her empirical study on transposition in the Netherlands, 432 European Journal of Political Research 48: 432–454, 2009 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2009.01832.x © 2009 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2009 (European Consortium for Political Research) Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA