Steffen Hurka

Most laws require support from members of both parties. We test whether the coalition that enacts a bill leaves a signature in the scope and structure of the law it produces. In applying an enacting coalition typology to all public laws passed since 1947, we assess the impact on two measures of legislative design: the breadth of the legislation (versatility) and the clarity with which the law is written (precision). We find a clear relationship between the enacting coalition and the versatility of a law. Bipartisan laws are scoped more narrowly than more partisan legislation. For precision, we report null results. We complement our statistical approach with interviews of the House Office of the Legislative Counsel and two Senate legislative directors to better understand how these mechanisms function in practice. Our combined results suggest that the versatility of a law is a feature of the enacting coalition that is bargained over, whereas precision is contingent on the overall conditions within a given Congress.

Do policy experts advance their positions more successfully in legislative negotiations? Using novel data on professional backgrounds, education, and special interest ties, we examine the extent to which individual characteristics of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) shape legislative outcomes across five key European Parliament committees. Drawing on DEU IV data on group‐level positions, we test whether MEPs best suited to serve as committee rapporteurs are also most effective at influencing policy results. We identify the conditions under which expertise and stakeholder connections strengthen legislative impact within the Parliament's committee system. Results show that MEPs with relevant expertise and demonstrated interests can more successfully shape committee positions, but these advantages disappear in inter‐institutional negotiations. Effects also vary by type of expertise and interest. Overall, findings highlight how legislator backgrounds influence party leaders' choices of committee leadership and internal policy coordination.

We examine bureaucratic politics within the European Commission, using novel data on the backgrounds of individual members of Commissioners' cabinets. Although cabinet composition has become increasingly regulated in recent decades, its selection remains a key area for personalised political appointments within an organisation more commonly known for its collective responsibility and lack of individual influence. Using data on the personal and professional backgrounds of cabinet members since the first Barroso Commission, we trace how administrative reforms meant primarily to ‘de‐nationalise’ the selection of appointees have led to changes in cabinet composition. We then explore how cabinet composition impacts on the complexity of Commission proposals and its subsequent inter‐institutional negotiations. We find that whilst more diversity of Commission cabinets clearly enhances the input legitimacy of the EU's legislative process, it neither benefits nor threatens the quality of the Commission's policy proposals or how they are processed politically.

This study examines the relationship between the complexity of EU directives and their successful implementation at the national level. Moving beyond the state‐of‐the‐art, we propose a comprehensive framework considering structural, linguistic, and relational dimensions of policy complexity. We argue that policy complexity entails higher transaction costs, hindering effective implementation. Using a novel dataset covering roughly 1000 directives from 1994 to 2022, we find strong evidence of policy complexity negatively impacting implementation performance. Moreover, we find that states with higher administrative capacity are better able to process high complexity efficiently and that Eurosceptic member states attract fewer infringement proceedings in highly complex policy environments than Europhile member states. This could alternatively point to strategic enforcement behavior of the Commission or to bureaucracies that are less Eurosceptic than their political masters might wish for. Our study thereby contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges of successful implementation of EU directives.

There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time‐consuming endeavor as it requires the manual assessment and coding of legal acts. The assessment of the structural characteristics of laws and regulations, by contrast, can be done applying automated natural language processing. An important critical question is, thus, whether we can combine these approaches and simplify the information extraction by inferring changes in the policy substance from the legislative context in which these changes are embedded. Examining more than 100 legal acts in the area of EU environmental and climate policy, we find that the measures capturing policy substance and the structural characteristics of legal acts context are not systematically linked. In other words: changes in the structural features of legal acts cannot be used as an approximation for changes in policy substance. We conclude by sketching out a research agenda when (and when not) to use the different concepts and related measurements.

Experience and loyalty have been identified as major explanations for why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are selected as committee rapporteurs in the European Parliament. Yet, existing research implicitly assumes that these explanations operate in isolation of what the report is about. In this article, we hypothesize that the effects of experience and loyalty on MEPs’ chances to become rapporteurs should be conditioned by the complexity of the Commission's legislative proposal. We show that party group coordinators indeed distribute the most complex legislative tasks to highly experienced MEPs but cannot confirm such a conditional relationship for the effect of loyalty. Our study contributes to the literature on the legislative organization in the European Parliament by highlighting the role of proposal complexity for the report allocation process.

Despite its importance for the sustainability of democratic governance, policy complexity is still an understudied phenomenon. What makes policies complex? Why are some policies more complex than others? And what are the consequences of this complexity for the political, economic and societal level? These questions still lack answers, which is both due to a lack of conceptual clarity and a lack of suitable data. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce the EUPLEX dataset, comprising information on the complexity of more than 6,000 policy proposals adopted by the European Commission between 1993 and today. Relying on automated methods of data collection and natural language processing, EUPLEX allows us to compare the complexity of Commission proposals over time, across policy domains, and institutional and political configurations. The dataset will be updated continuously in the future as new policy proposals become available and is available free of charge to the research community.

Regulations and directives are the central legal instruments used by the EU. In some instances, the Commission is not legally required to choose a specific legal instrument, but can make this decision autonomously. However, we know surprisingly little about the factors that influence this decision. Based on an original dataset of all directives and regulations proposed by the European Commission in ordinary legislative procedures between 2009 and 2018, we find that the choice of a legal instrument is strongly determined by prior policy decisions and varies systematically across policy areas depending on the extent to which they have traditionally been addressed under the co‐decision procedure. In addition, we find that the Commission's use of regulations increases under conditions of increased euroscepticism, indicating that instead of granting dissenting member states more room to manoeuvre, the Commission prefers to keep them on a short leash.

The standing committees of the European Parliament perform crucial policy-making functions and, accordingly, the question of how they are composed assumes great relevance. Unlike previous studies, which primarily looked at committee assignments from the perspective of individual MEPs, we assess the representativeness of entire committees by comparing their preference distributions with those we find in the plenary on the left/right and pro/anti EU dimension. For our analysis, we combine new data on committee memberships in the ninth European Parliament with data on policy preferences of national parties from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. In order to assess committee representativeness, we calculate the extent to which the preference distributions of committees and the plenary overlap. We show that committee representativeness is a function of committee popularity and power. Committee popularity provides party groups with a larger pool of applicants to choose from and since popular committees are often also quite large, the formation of representative committees is facilitated. Moreover, the party groups of the European Parliament have stronger incentives to form balanced committee contingents for powerful committees, resulting in higher committee representativeness. However, this latter finding is qualified by two outliers and we only find the hypothesized relationship to hold on the pro/anti EU dimension.