The (non-)use of ex post legislative evaluations by the European Commission

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Better regulation
• European Commission
• EU legislation
• evaluation use
• ex post evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Stijn van Voorst is a PhD candidate at Tilburg Law School at Tilburg University.

Pieter Zwaan is an assistant professor at the Institute for Management Research at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Notes

1 Other types of use often mentioned in the literature are accountability use, conceptual use and strategic use. Because these types of use may be driven by different factors than instrumental use, they are not considered in this article. For a study about the accountability use of EPL evaluations, see Zwaan et al. (2016).

2 The Commission classified three cases that met all our criteria as ‘studies’ instead of EPL evaluations. These cases were dropped to avoid unnecessary discussions about terminology.

3 The following keywords were entered in the search engine of Politico (which also shows the results for articles of European Voice) at https://www.politico.eu/: ‘seed marketing’, ‘plant seeds’ and ‘plant propagating’ (S&PM case), ‘consumer protection’ (CPC case) and ‘animal welfare’ (animal welfare case). We searched for the entire period of time between the initiation of the evaluation and either the legislative proposal or the decision not to propose legislation.