Policy complexity and legislative duration in the European Union
| Author | Steffen Hurka,Maximilian Haag |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116519859431 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Union Politics
Policy complexity and
2020, Vol. 21(1) 87–108
! The Author(s) 2019
legislative duration in
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116519859431
the European Union
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Steffen Hurka
Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU
Munich, Munich, Germany
Maximilian Haag
School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim,
Mannheim, Germany
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 pro-
cedure 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.
Keywords
Decision-making, duration, European Union, policy complexity, survival analysis
Corresponding author:
Steffen Hurka, Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538
Munich, Germany.
Email: steffen.hurka@gsi.uni-muenchen.de
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European Union Politics 21(1)
I wish that the superfluous and tedious statutes were brought into one sum together, and
made more plain and short.
Edward VI, King of England and Ireland, 1537–1553.
Introduction
King Edward VI can hardly be blamed for his lack of understanding of the intri-
cacies of English law – after all, he died at age 15. But when he complained about
policy complexity in 16th-century England, he certainly did not see the European
Union (EU) coming. Since its inception, the EU has been proliferating enormous
amounts of legislation. Today, the complexity of secondary law that permeates
Europe not only implies major managerial challenges for those in power and their
bureaucracies, but also involves significant cognitive burdens for the public (Adam
et al., 2019). The EU has recognized these challenges and increasingly aims to
simplify its legislation as reflected in its recently introduced regulatory fitness
and performance program (REFIT), which is part of the Commission’s broader
‘Better Regulation’ agenda. In 2015, the responsible Commissioner Frans
Timmermans sounded not that different from Edward VI when he stated: ‘It is
essential that every single measure in the EU’s rulebook is fit for purpose –
modern, effective, proportionate, operational and as simple as possible’
(Timmermans, 2015). Thus, policy complexity has been an issue for centuries,
but the core questions surrounding it remain unanswered: what exactly is policy
complexity and how does it matter for the legislative process? In this contribution,
we address both questions by (a) providing a conceptualization and measurement
approach that allows us to assess and compare the complexity of legislative pro-
posals in the EU and (b) analyzing the extent to which different forms of policy
complexity impact on the efficiency of the ordinary legislative procedure under the
rules of Lisbon.
While the existence of policy complexity at the EU level is well recognized both
by practitioners and EU scholars, we lack appropriate conceptual tools to capture
the phenomenon and accordingly, we know only very little about its origins and
consequences. Drawing on descriptive approaches in computer science and law, we
distinguish between structural, linguistic and relational policy complexity
(Bommarito II and Katz, 2010; Katz and Bommarito II, 2014). While structural
policy complexity relates to the size of a certain policy proposal, linguistic policy
complexity captures the conceptual variety present in a legal text and relational
policy complexity addresses the interdependencies within a policy proposal and the
extent to which the policy proposal relies on additional, existing EU law for inter-
pretation and implementation. We show that incorporating these types of policy
complexity is of great relevance for the explanation of the duration of the legisla-
tive process. In particular, our findings suggest that different types of policy
Hurka and Haag
89
complexity crucially influence the duration of decision-making processes in the EU
to varying degrees, at different points in time and partially in unexpected ways.
Beyond these theoretical considerations related to the existing literature,
we consider our contribution important for several additional reasons. First, we
regard it as problematic that for the past few years, the European Commission has
been equating ‘simpler’ legislation with ‘cheaper and less’ legislation. Accordingly,
the Commission has repeatedly highlighted the importance of financial impact
assessments and reduced the number of new legislative proposals. Yet, both the
costs and the amount of EU legislation do not tell us anything about how complex
the proposed legislation actually is. Second, and related to this, the concept of
policy complexity allows us (and the European Commission) to compare the policy
content of extremely different policy types on a common dimension. Unlike con-
cepts like policy restrictiveness or policy intensity, which mainly pertain to regu-
latory policies or policy generosity, which might be more relevant in the context of
distributive policies, policy complexity is a concept that transcends the boundaries
of policy types and thus allows for more general statements on the dynamics of
policy making. Finally, our research has important normative implications. While
we do not call for a general reduction in the complexity of the European
Commission’s policy proposals, we make the case that the EU needs to make
sure that the complexity of these proposals matches the carrying capacity of its
political institutions.
Policy complexity as a neglected concept in EU research
Research on the legislative process in the EU and its decision-making outcomes
has largely been conducted through an institutional analytical lens. Most promi-
nently, spatial approaches to decision-making have focused on the role of institu-
tional scope conditions, the heterogeneity of actor preferences, and the interaction
of the two (e.g. Tsebelis and Garrett, 2000). This strand of scholarship has
produced a wealth of insights on how the EU operates and why some actors are
more successful than others in the legislative process. Yet, while the political and
institutional aspects of decision-making in the EU have been examined extensively,
the question of what is actually being negotiated often only plays a secondary role.
To a large extent, this neglect can be attributed to the problem that policy content
is extremely hard to measure in a way that allows for systematic comparison across
policy sectors and over time. Moreover, next to these conceptual challenges, it is
also quite demanding to obtain the necessary data.
As an important exception to this general pattern, the project ‘Decision Making
in the EU’ (DEU) has collected information on the positions of various policy
stakeholders on a set of policy issues and analyzed the corresponding legislative
negotiations comparatively (Thomson et al., 2006, 2012). The project can be
regarded as a milestone in EU research as it delivered many important insights
into the legislative process of the EU. However, it focused exclusively on salient
and controversial policy topics and was mainly interested in the ideological
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European Union Politics 21(1)
distances between the involved political actors on a given policy issue, not in the
intricacies of the underlying policy content as such. Yet, regardless of whether the
complexity of policy content matters for the quality of decision-making outcomes,
it should certainly matter a great deal for the efficiency of the legislative process, as
it augments the transaction costs for all involved political institutions and actors.
Accordingly, the time it takes to decide may well be influenced by the complexity
of what it is that must be decided upon.
The duration of the legislative process in the EU has been attributed to a variety
of factors by the existing literature. Hertz and Leuffen (2011) demonstrate a
procedure-prolonging effect of EU enlargement and resulting changes in group
size within the EU institutions, while Toshkov (2017) contested this finding with
new empirical evidence. Schulz and K€
onig (2000) find the undertaken institutional
reforms of the decision-making process to have a time-reducing effect, whereas
Bølstad and Cross (2016) recently demonstrated that not all treaty revisions were
equally important and that only the Amsterdam Treaty had a significant impact.
Other studies identify preference heterogeneity between member states (Dru¨ner
et al., 2018; Golub, 2007; K€
onig, 2007) and EU institutions (Klu¨ver and
Sagarzazu, 2013) as determinants of decision-making efficiency. Golub and
Steunenberg (2007) highlight the role of qualified majority voting in the Council
as a key institutional variable reducing legislative duration. Rasmussen and
Toshkov (2013) show that legislative...
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