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

Proposal complexity and report allocation in the European Parliament

“…Accordingly, the effect of MEP committee experience is conditional on the complexity of the policy substance of the underlying legislative dossier and the supplementary analyses in the Online appendix suggest that this effect is particularly important when the EP lacks formal power to veto and amend Commission proposals under the consultation procedure. Against the background of increasingly complex legislative proposals adopted by the European Commission (Hurka et al, 2022), these results highlight that high turnover rates within the EP can hurt the parliament's legislative efficiency considerably. Reports of declining membership turnover over time (Daniel, 2015; Whitaker, 2014) therefore constitute good news for the EP's party group coordinators, who would otherwise be confronted with the task of distributing increasingly complex legislative tasks to increasingly inexperienced legislators.…”

“…Accordingly, we expected to find that highly experienced and loyal MEPs are entrusted with the most demanding legislative tasks, whereas experience and loyalty should play a lesser role when the policy substance under scrutiny is of lower complexity. Combining data on the complexity of 937 Commission proposals (Hurka et al, 2022) with data on the experience and loyalty of MEPs (Chiou et al, 2020), we put these hypotheses to an empirical test…”

Condemned to complexity? Growing state activity and complex policy systems

“…They also relate to our specific measurement that captures the complexity of sectoral policy portfolios via the diversity of policy instruments used. There are (obviously) other measures of policy complexity that rely, for instance, on automated methods of natural language processing (Hurka et al, 2021; Senninger, 2021). All these approaches have their strength and weaknesses as they capture different aspects and dimensions of policy complexity.…”

“…Curiously, though, we know much less about the exact shape that the expansion of state activity takes. In particular, the conditions and consequences of complex state actions have neither been systematically measured nor analyzed in a comparative fashion across time, countries, or policy sectors (Hurka et al, 2021). The lack of comparative analyses becomes even more surprising given the fact that observers in the United States have recently argued that “the issues that will dominate American politics going forward will concern the complexity of government, rather than its sheer size” (Teles, 2013 p. 97).…”

Ever more soft law? A dataset to compare binding and non-binding EU law across policy areas and over time (2004–2019)

“…One type of datasets relies at least partially on legal files being coded by humans (Pollack, 1994;Toshkov, 2010). The other type involves automated data collection using computer-based coding to derive information from various sources related to EU law and law-making, such as Eur-Lex, Pre-Lex, or other institutional sites (Fjelstul, 2019;Häge, 2011;Hurka et al, 2021;König et al, 2006;Ovádek, 2021). The advantages of automated data collection include the large amount of data involved, their potential to provide continuous updates, and the replicability for the data collection process.…”