The institutional and political roots of complex policies: Evidence from the European Union

The complexity of public policies has repeatedly been identified as a key challenge for modern democracies. Yet, we know only very little about the origins of this complexity. Controlling for functional and legal explanations, this article investigates whether complex policies have distinct institutional and political origins. The study builds on the assumption that complex policies are communicated in more complex language and uses textual data from 1771 legislative proposals issued by the European Commission since 1994 to demonstrate that the complexity of public policies is strongly tied to institutional and political costs of policy formulation. Collegial cabinets formulate more complex policies whenever they face more inclusive decision-making processes and struggle with higher internal preference bias and heterogeneity. The implications of these findings reach far beyond the political system of the European Union and highlight that to a considerable degree, complex policies are the price of inclusive democratic decision making

Britain’s exit from the EU will benefit the South and weaken Germany

For the European Union, the exit of the United Kingdom will not only have major economic consequences, also the political fallout will be substantial. Although some observers now fear that Europe will be more dominated by Germany, such fears might be exaggerated. Steffen Hurka writes that when we examine its voting power in the European institutions the opposite may be true. Germany will lose the UK as one of its most important allies, and it may also have to face a stronger group of MEPs from the Southern member states

Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union

Regulations and directives are the central legal instruments used by the EU. In some instances, the Commission is not legally required to choose a specific legal instrument, but can make this decision autonomously. However, we know surprisingly little about the factors that influence this decision. Based on an original dataset of all directives and regulations proposed by the European Commission in ordinary legislative procedures between 2009 and 2018, we find that the choice of a legal instrument is strongly determined by prior policy decisions and varies systematically across policy areas depending on the extent to which they have traditionally been addressed under the co-decision procedure. In addition, we find that the Commission's use of regulations increases under conditions of increased euroscepticism, indicating that instead of granting dissenting member states more room to manoeuvre, the Commission prefers to keep them on a short leash

Policy complexity in the European Union, 1993-today: introducing the EUPLEX dataset

Despite its importance for the sustainability of democratic governance, policy complexity is still an understudied phenomenon. What makes policies complex? Why are some policies more complex than others? And what are the consequences of this complexity for the political, economic and societal level? These questions still lack answers, which is both due to a lack of conceptual clarity and a lack of suitable data. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce the EUPLEX dataset, comprising information on the complexity of more than 6,000 policy proposals adopted by the European Commission between 1993 and today. Relying on automated methods of data collection and natural language processing, EUPLEX allows us to compare the complexity of Commission proposals over time, across policy domains, and institutional and political configurations. The dataset will be updated continuously in the future as new policy proposals become available and is available free of charge to the research community

Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament

Experience and loyalty have been identified as major explanations for why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are selected as committee rapporteurs in the European Parliament. Yet, existing research implicitly assumes that these explanations operate in isolation of what the report is about. In this article, we hypothesize that the effects of experience and loyalty on MEPs’ chances to become rapporteurs should be conditioned by the complexity of the Commission's legislative proposal. We show that party group coordinators indeed distribute the most complex legislative tasks to highly experienced MEPs but cannot confirm such a conditional relationship for the effect of loyalty. Our study contributes to the literature on the legislative organization in the European Parliament by highlighting the role of proposal complexity for the report allocation process

New member states are structurally underrepresented in important rapporteur positions in the European Parliament

In the European Parliament, a ‘rapporteur’ is an MEP appointed to oversee the drafting and presentation of reports. This role is highly important in the Parliament, with rapporteurs being elected to the position by their fellow MEPs. But does the distribution of these appointments favour certain states over others? Steffen Hurka, Michael Kaeding and Lukas Obholzer present findings from a study of the allocation of rapporteurs in the 2009-14 parliament. They find that new member states that joined in the 2004 and 2007 enlargements were underrepresented among rapporteurs and were therefore less able to influence EU legislation than older member states

Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory(sic)(sic)(sic)Palabras clave

In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their proximity to economic matters: social, environmental, and morality policy. We make two contributions. First, we show that economic crises lead to more incrementalist patterns of policy change in crisis-remote policy subsystems and make policy punctuations in these areas less likely. However, if such punctuations do occur, they tend to be particularly extreme. Second, we argue that the empirical implications of PET are best tested by separately analyzing variance as an indicator for incrementalism and degrees of freedom as an indicator for punctuations. The empirical analysis builds on two data sets capturing policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980-2013)

Where are the MEPs from the accession countries? Rapporteurship assignments in the European Parliament after enlargement.

This article seeks to identify factors that influence the chances of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) becoming rapporteurs. More specifically, it attempts to answer the question of how MEPs from the accession countries were integrated into the report allocation process, which is crucial for EU legislative decision-making. Drawing on extended data from the last three legislative terms (1994-2009), the results confirm and challenge existing knowledge. First, the allocation of rapporteurship does not mirror the composition of the full plenary, but points towards strong under-representation of certain national delegations. Most important is the virtual absence of MEPs from the accession countries. Representing 22% of the full plenary, they reported on only 9% of all co-decision procedures concluded in the first legislative term after the 2004 enlargement. This pattern of under-representation is evident even when comparing the figures with first-time MEPs form the longer-standing Member States

Changing the output : The logic of amendment success in the European Parliament´s ENVI committee

This study tests three hypotheses on factors driving the success and failure of amendments in the European Parliament’s ENVI committee. The hypotheses, which are derived from different theories of legislative organization, are tested with an original dataset containing 550 amendments from 55 ENVI members. Contrary to existing empirical evidence on the structure of political conflict in plenary, the results suggest that a committee member’s general ideological orientation on the left-right dimension is not decisive for his prospects to change the committee output. Instead, it seems like ENVI members with ties to green interest groups play a greater role in the formulation of environmental policies than committee members without comparable affiliations. Finally, the empirical evidence indicates that rapporteurs are only rarely challenged successfully by competing amendments. However, they are often willing to accept compromises