Theoretically, ex-post legislative (EPL) evaluations play an important role in the European regulatory cycle. By critically assessing the administration, compliance or outcomes of legislation, they may allow for learning and inform enforcement. At the same time, the European Commission may have incentives not to evaluate, as EPL evaluations may lead to undesired policy change or repeal. Furthermore, the development of systematic, highquality EPL evaluations is threatened by more technical problems in the sphere of evaluability. Hence, the odds are against the systematic production of high-quality evaluations in the European Union (EU). This article assesses this argument by conducting a meta evaluation of the coverage and quality of ex-post legislative evaluations by the European Commission, using two novel datasets. The main findings are that EPL evaluation coverage indeed is patchy, with no clear upward trend in recent years. EPL evaluation is primarily a matter of legislative obligation instead of own initiative. There is great scope, finally, for enhancing the quality of EPL evaluations, by improving methodological quality, stakeholder involvement and transparency.

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.

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As a part of its Better Regulation agenda, the European Commission increasingly stresses the link between different types of regulatory evaluations. Predictions made by Impact Assessments (IAs) could be verified during ex–post legislative evaluations, while ex–post evaluations in turn could recommend amendments to be studied in future IAs. This article combines a dataset of 309 ex–post legislative evaluations (2000-2014) and a dataset of 225 IAs of legislative updates (2003-2014) to show how many ex–post evaluations of the Commission use IAs and vice versa. This way, it explores if the Commission's rhetoric of a ‘regulatory cycle’ holds up in practice. Building on the literature of evaluation use, we formulate the hypotheses that the timeliness, quality and focus of the IAs and evaluations are key explanations for use. Our results show that so far only ten ex–post evaluations have used IAs of EU legislation, while thirty three IAs have used ex–post legislative evaluations. Using Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we find that timeliness is a necessary condition of the use of ex–post evaluations by IAs, suggesting that for the regulatory cycle to function properly, it is crucial to complete an ex–post evaluation before an IA is launched. Future research could repeat our analysis for evaluations of non–regulatory activities or study the causal mechanisms behind our findings.

Evaluations are a potentially important tool for democratic governments: they provide a basis for accountability and policy learning. To contribute to these key functions, evaluations must be of sufficient methodological quality. However, this quality is threatened by both political influences and technical complexities. This article describes and explains the variance in the quality of ex-post legislative (EPL) evaluations conducted by the European Commission, which is a frontrunner in this realm. A number of potential political and technical explanations of evaluation quality are tested with a unique, self-constructed dataset of 153 EPL evaluations. The results show that the Commission's EPL evaluations usually apply a robust methodology, while the clarity of their scope, the accuracy of their data and the foundations of their conclusions are problematic. The variance in this quality is mainly explained by the type of evaluator: EPL evaluations conducted by external actors are of higher quality than evaluations conducted internally by the Commission.