The nature of EU rules: strict and detailed, or lacking bite?

The goal of this project was to develop a tool that distills the number of obligations contained in each and every item of European law ever adopted in the EU’s history (some 180,000 acts adopted from 1952-2023). Since existing studies on EU regulation only count the number of laws adopted without accounting for their actual contents, a more fine grained measurement of the number of obligations specified in EU law greatly advances the debate. In other words, existing research has used pretty bad proxies for measuring regulatory density.

Using this tool, developments over time can be observed, as well as between policy areas. One key finding (which has been outlined in two papers that are still under review) is that the number of EU laws has steadily gone down over the past 30 years, while the number of obligations rises consistently. This finding advances the debate in itself, in addition to the measurement which allows for many more fine-grained and large-scale analyses of the development of EU regulation.

This project specified four objectives:

1. Scraping EU directives and regulations from the EU’s legislative repository. This goal has been met. In addition, EU decisions (which are a separate category) have also been included.
2. Measuring strictness (operationalized as the number of obligations), and measuring the addressees of the obligations using NLP and Sentiment Analysis. This goal has been met with NLP, instead of Sentiment Analysis an AI-approach to NLP has been tested as an alternative approach.
3. Graphical and numerical presentation of findings: this goal has been met.
4. If time allows, comparison with national legislation. This goal has not been met due to lack of time.

The target audience – for the time being – is political scientists specializing in EU affairs. Only once more research has been carried out using the collected data (or the tool) as a source, communication to the general public would be an obvious next step.