Laws are important vehicles for policy. They are generally complex and involve various interventions. Despite their pervasive presence and numerous evaluation studies, laws have not been a topic of meta-analytical interest among social scientists. As a result, we lack an overall picture of the type(s) of interventions involved in laws, of the chains of events these are expected to set off and of the outcomes. Nor do we know much about the contents and quality of legislative evaluations. In a first attempt to address this gap, we developed a method to review legislative evaluations inspired by the sociology of law and by the realist synthesis approach. The article presents the results of a review of 75 legislative evaluation reports, which were completed between 1998 and 2005 in the Netherlands. These reports address laws in a variety of policy domains, from justice to health care and from social affairs to education. First, we subjected the reports to a methodological quality assessment procedure, after which 59 reports of acceptable quality remained for inclusion in a synthesis. Among other things, our method revealed that laws very often contain (new) public management interventions directed at executive bodies, rather than regulatory or economic interventions directed at citizens and businesses. The chains of events to be activated by these interventions remain vague. Nevertheless, we were able to come up with a preliminary typology of these programme 'mechanisms', which can be used as input for future research. Our method also demonstrated that contexts affected these chains of events in a variety of ways.

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