Stijn van Voorst (Tilburg University, the Netherlands):To evaluate or not to evaluate: the initiation of ex-post legislative evaluations by the European Commission

Abstract: Theoretically there are many possible reasons for the European Commission to evaluate its legislation, including the desire to improve policy-making and the need to scrutinize implementation by national authorities. While the Commission nowadays has the norm that both spending and non-spending activities should be evaluated, its own data and existing research show that only a minority of major EU legislation is in fact evaluated. My paper tries to explain this variance in the initiation of ex-post legislative evaluations by applying a rational and political model of evaluation. It tests these models with the help of two datasets, one containing all major EU laws from 2000-2004 and one containing all ex-post legislative evaluations from the Commission from 2000-2014.