Evaluations may perform a key role in political systems as they provide a basis for parliaments to hold their executives accountable. This is equally the case in the European Union. Yet, several factors may work against the usage of European Union evaluations for accountability purposes. Members of the European Parliament work under great time pressure and executives may have little incentives to produce highquality evaluations. This article therefore addresses the question of to what extent and when Members of the European Parliament use ex post legislative evaluations. We present an analysis of 220 evaluations, studying how many were referred to in parliamentary questions. Our main finding is that 16% of the evaluations are followed up through questions. However, the parliamentary questions hardly serve accountability aims. Members of the European Parliament mostly use evaluations for agenda-setting purposes. The main variable explaining differences in the usage of evaluations is the level of conflict between the European Parliament and Commission during the legislative process. Points for practitionersThis article studies the usage of ex post evaluations of European Union legislation by Members of the European Parliament for accountability purposes by analysing European Parliament questions. It shows that MEPs ask different types of questions, referring to ex post evaluations. Most of the questions reveal forward-looking rather than Downloaded from backward-looking motives, aimed at agenda-setting and policy change instead of accountability. It concludes that variance in parliamentary questions about the followup of evaluation outcomes can be explained by the level of conflict between the European Parliament and Commission during the legislative stage.

This article investigates the policy discourses at European level and in France, Germany and the UK during the debate on the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) post-2013 reform. The neoliberal discourse that has provided the intellectual justification for reform during the last decade is now increasingly combined with a 'public goods' discourse related to the multifunctionalist discourse of the 1990s. Innovating on earlier discursive analyses of the CAP debate, this article distinguishes between discourses used during the uploading (negotiations) and the downloading (implementation) phases. In doing so it uncovers the effects of domestic-international interactions on the application of different competing discourses. The member states' domestic legitimating discourses applied to 'sell' the eventual CAP agreement tend to align with existing domestic policy paradigms rather than with dominant discourses at the EU level, indicating that discourses are prone to strategic usage.

This article explores the impact of domestic politics on the implementation of European Union (EU) directives in the Netherlands. Its central argument is that member states can change their views on EU policies during the implementation of the directive. The resulting new mismatch between domestic and European policies can cause a divergence in policy outlook among EU members, deadlock situations and attempts to change or reverse the directive. Thus far, EU implementation studies consider mismatches between EU and domestic norms mainly as a problem of delayed implementation and assume that governments eventually achieve full compliance. In contrast, we argue that domestic responses to EU directives could cause a continuous flow of severe criticism at the domestic level. This feedback could lead to a reinterpretation of the directive at the national level, but also to attempts to change the directive at the EU level. We use the EU directive on Foot and Mouth Disease as a case study to illustrate how shifting values in Dutch politics have caused such strong feedback.

The European Commission has repeatedly emphasized that the results of ex post legislative (EPL) evaluations should be used to improve the quality of its legislative proposals. This article aims to explain the variation in such instrumental use of EPL evaluations by the Commission. Three high-quality EPL evaluations with varying levels of use were studied in-depth to assess the influence of political factors on evaluation use. The results show that, contrary to expectations, EPL evaluations may be used instrumentally even if their recommendations are opposed by important political actors in the legislative process. This article also shows that a lack of salience of the policy field to which an EPL evaluation belongs in the eyes of the Commission could, in combination with the institution's ambition to reduce its legislative output, be a sufficient condition for the non-use of that evaluation.

This article describes the establishment of a new local governance arrangement called 'GreenService' in the Netherlands. Under this programme, farmers are financially rewarded -by both public and private bodies -for their nature and landscape management and development activities. Despite a general positive stance, it has taken considerable efforts and time for these programmes to take off, in particular due to uncertainties and discussions on whether these activities would be feasible under the EU state aid regime. The multi level setting in which these rules had to be complied with contributed much to the long lasting discussion on how to interpret these rules and threatened the credibility of this new governance arrangement. We will describe and explain this process by using a so-called 'processual institutional' approach and more specifically by drawing on the socio-cognitive literature on conflict escalation (Pruitt and Rubin 1986;Rubin, Pruitt et al. 1994).