Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Institutional Maximization And Path Dependency – The Delay Of Implementation Of The Eu Public Sector Information Directive In Sweden, Jan Kallberg, Erik Lakomaa

Jan Kallberg

The implementation of the EU public sector information (PSI) directive was expected to open up European governmental data sources for commercialization and create, conservatively estimated, a € 32 billion European public information market. Institutional arrangements and governmental path dependency has delayed the directive’s implementation in several countries, most notably Poland and Sweden. In this paper we use the Swedish case to examine how bureaucratic inertia and path dependence can stall the implementation of EU directives that conflicts with the member state’s internal bureaucratic agenda. Sweden usually implements EU directives rapidly and extensively. In the case of the PSI-directive however, the …