A sentence-based approach to measuring EU regulatory activity

Researchers who provide overviews of the EU’s regulatory activity typically count the number of directives, regulations and decisions, or subsets thereof, which, however, vary tremendously in scope, length and importance. This paper argues that we need to change the unit of analysis to sentences within legal acts and count how many include regulatory statements. Building on recent advancements in computational linguistics we use (Crawford, S., & Ostrom, E. (1995). A grammar of institutions. American Political Science Review,89(3), 582–600. https://doi.org/10.2307/2082975; Ostrom, E. (2005).Understanding institutional diversity. Princeton University Press) Crawford and Ostrom’s (1995; Ostrom, 2005) Institutional Grammar Tool and natural language processing (NLP) to provide an overview of the EU’s regulatory activity based on the contents of all legal acts adopted and published inCELEX/EUR-Lex from 1952 through 2023. Our data, which we make publicly available, show significant regulatory activity in hitherto under-researched policy areas and that the EU’s regulatory activity has steadily increased since the turn of the century, while the number of adopted acts has been in decline.