The marginal involvement of the European Union (EU) in redistributive policies and its limited fiscal resources have led to a notable lack of attention by EU scholars towards the EU budget and its dynamics. Yet the nature of the budgetary data and their high usability for statistical analysis make them an excellent tool for studying and measuring policy change in the EU. In this article, I analyse an original dataset containing yearly data for the main categories of expenditure and how they have changed over the last three decades . Using time-series analysis, I find that the ability to form winning coalitions in the Council, the ideological positioning of the co-legislators and the inclusion of the cohesion countries have played a significant role in driving budget change.
Over the last three decades, European Union regulation of the internal market has become highly pervasive, affecting practically all domains of European citizens' lives. Many studies have focused on understanding the process and causes of regulatory change, but with limited attempts to analyse the more general sources of regulatory reform. This article focuses on the determinants of stability and change in EU regulation.An original dataset of 169 pieces of legislation (regulations, directives and decisions) across eight different sectors is developed and the dynamics of regulatory reform in the EU are analysed. Using time-series analysis of count data, evidence is found that the number of winning coalitions in the Council and the size of EU membership have a significant impact on regulatory reform in the EU. By contrast, the ideological composition of the EU's legislative bodies is not systematically related to regulatory reform.
This article presents a study of how institutional constraints affect legislative activism and how legislative activism in turn affects policy change through an analysis of the European Union's legislative process. The argument revolves around the key role of the European Commission in advancing policy change, and emphasises that the Commission can successfully push for increased policy change by increasing its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space widens. Using a novel panel dataset covering eight policy sectors from the period 1984–2012, the article shows that the number of legislative proposals significantly affects the extent of regulatory reform in the EU. The rise in the number of legislative proposals, in turn, is affected by the extent of gridlock between the EU's legislative bodies. These findings show that the Commission steps up its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space allows for greater policy change.
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