Ex post legislative evaluation in the European Union: questioning the usage of evaluations as instruments for accountability

Abstract

Evaluations may perform a key role in political systems as they provide a basis for parliaments to hold their executives accountable. This is equally the case in the European Union. Yet, several factors may work against the usage of European Union evaluations for accountability purposes. Members of the European Parliament work under great time pressure and executives may have little incentives to produce highquality evaluations. This article therefore addresses the question of to what extent and when Members of the European Parliament use ex post legislative evaluations. We present an analysis of 220 evaluations, studying how many were referred to in parliamentary questions. Our main finding is that 16% of the evaluations are followed up through questions. However, the parliamentary questions hardly serve accountability aims. Members of the European Parliament mostly use evaluations for agenda-setting purposes. The main variable explaining differences in the usage of evaluations is the level of conflict between the European Parliament and Commission during the legislative process. Points for practitionersThis article studies the usage of ex post evaluations of European Union legislation by Members of the European Parliament for accountability purposes by analysing European Parliament questions. It shows that MEPs ask different types of questions, referring to ex post evaluations. Most of the questions reveal forward-looking rather than Downloaded from backward-looking motives, aimed at agenda-setting and policy change instead of accountability. It concludes that variance in parliamentary questions about the followup of evaluation outcomes can be explained by the level of conflict between the European Parliament and Commission during the legislative stage.

The (non-)use of ex post legislative evaluations by the European Commission

“…Because these types of use may be driven by different factors than instrumental use, they are not considered in this article. For a study about the accountability use of EPL evaluations, see Zwaan et al (2016). 2.…”

“…Until now, such empirical research about the Commission's use of evaluations has focused on programme evaluations (e.g., De Laat and Williams 2014; Højlund 2014) and ex-ante legislative evaluations (e.g., Radaelli 2007;Torriti 2010). Conversely, the Commission's EPL evaluations have rarely been studied (but see Fitzpatrick 2012;Mastenbroek et al 2016;Zwaan et al 2016). Therefore, little is known about what factors affect the Commission's use EPL evaluations.…”

Varieties of accountability: How attributes of policy fields shape parliamentary oversight

“…The use of parliamentary requests as an oversight tool can also be observed in other countries, as discussed in Section 3. Moreover, several studies recently showed that evaluations are also frequently demanded by other parliaments (Speer, Pattyn, & De Peuter, ; Zwaan, van Voorst, & Mastenbroek, ). However, this does not mean that the findings of the analysis can simply be generalized, but that the dynamics detected in Switzerland should not be understated as the product of a specific context.…”

Learning from the Commission case: The comparative study of management change in international public administrations

“…It also established organization‐wide evaluation comparatively early, in 2005, making the organization the first to feature both characteristics. The Commission for most of the observation period relied exclusively on evaluations within its Directorates‐General, establishing centralized evaluations only in 2009 (see Zwaan et al ), but can be considered a forerunner among IGOs in shifting to accrual accounting in 2004. By 2014 all organizations were characterized by both accrual accounting and organization‐wide evaluations.…”