Policy complexity and legislative duration in the European Union

Abstract

This article investigates the impact of policy complexity on the duration of legislative negotiations in the European Union employing survival analysis. We conceptualize policy complexity as a three-dimensional construct encompassing structural, linguistic and relational components. Building on this conceptual framework, we measure the complexity of 889 Commission proposals published under the ordinary legislative procedure between 2009 and 2018. Controlling for institutional and political drivers of legislative duration identified by previous studies, we show that different types of policy complexity influence the duration of the decision-making process in the European Union to varying degrees, at different points in time and partially in unexpected ways. On a general level, our study highlights that developing a better understanding of the origins and consequences of policy complexity in the European Union is a key task for scholars of European integration.

One agenda-setter or many? The varying success of policy initiatives by individual Directorates-General of the European Commission 1994–2016

“…Regarding policy characteristics, legislative anticipation should be negatively related to more complex proposals touching upon more diverse social and legal phenomena (H4). To measure policy complexity, I follow recent, text-based large-N studies (Hurka and Haag, 2020;Katz and Bommarito, 2014) exploiting information theory and Shannon's signal entropy, in particular. Entropy captures the informational density of a message along the variability of signals it contains.…”

Legal Instrument Choice in the European Union

“…Moreover, as the Commission might also pick a given legal instrument for purely functional reasons, we added control variables for the characteristics of the individual policy proposals. In particular, we controlled for three types of complexity associated with any given Commission proposal, following the approach recently advocated by Hurka and Haag (2019): the proposal's structural size (i.e., the number of recitals, paragraphs, subparagraphs, points and indents), its linguistic complexity (i.e. its word entropy (Shannon, 1948)) and its relational complexity (i.e., the average number of cross references per article).…”

“…Few studies analyse the impact of using different legal instruments, most prominently those dealing with explaining the duration of the decision-making process. The main finding in this strand of literature is that directives usually take longer to be adopted than regulations and decisions (for example, Hurka and Haag, 2019;Klüver and Sagarzazu, 2013;Rasmussen and Toshkov, 2013). To a large extent, scholars of European integration have focused on analysing directives only.…”

What Makes Policy Complex?

“…The more recitals a policy act includes, the more information it is supposed to carry. Conceptually, the number of recitals intends to capture the size of a policy and the costs an individual would need to invest in working through the policy (Hurka and Haag, 2019). Even though most studies in the context of the European Union refrain from defining policy complexity, the rationale behind the use of recitals comes close to the definition provided by Ehrlich (2011), which considers a policy to be complex if it has many provisions or exceptions and provides many details.…”

“…First, my definition can be seen as an integration of existing ways to describe complex policies. While some argue that policy complexity depends on the length and detail of a policy (Ehrlich, 2011;Thomson and Torenvlied, 2011;Yordanova and Zhelyazkova, 2020), others say that complex policies are the result of the increasing number of relations between policies (Krehbiel, 1991;Hurka and Haag, 2019;Adam et al, 2019). The two approaches consider reasonable but different aspects of complex polices.…”