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AbstractThe complexity of public policies has repeatedly been identified as a key challenge for modern democracies. Yet, we know only very little about the origins of this complexity. Controlling for functional and legal explanations, this article investigates whether complex policies have distinct institutional and political origins. The study builds on the assumption that complex policies are communicated in more complex language and uses textual data from 1771 legislative proposals issued by the European Commission since 1994 to demonstrate that the complexity of public policies is strongly tied to institutional and political costs of policy formulation. Collegial cabinets formulate more complex policies whenever they face more inclusive decision‐making processes and struggle with higher internal preference bias and heterogeneity. The implications of these findings reach far beyond the political system of the European Union and highlight that to a considerable degree, complex policies are the price of inclusive democratic decision making.

While the causes of rampage violence have been analysed thoroughly in diverse academic disciplines, we hardly know anything about the factors that affect their consequences for public policy. This book addresses rampage shootings in Western Europe and their conditional impact on politicization and policy change in the area of gun control. The author sets out to unravel the factors that facilitate or impede the access of gun control to the political agenda in the wake of rampage shootings and analyses why some political debates lead to profound shifts of the policy status quo, while others peter out without any legislative reactions. In so doing, the book not only contributes to the theoretical literature on crisis-induced policy making, but also provides a wealth of case-study evidence on rampage shootings as empirical phenomena.

This study tests three hypotheses on factors driving the success and failure of amendments in the European Parliament's ENVI committee. The hypotheses, which are derived from different theories of legislative organization, are tested with an original dataset containing 550 amendments from 55 ENVI members. Contrary to existing empirical evidence on the structure of political conflict in plenary, the results suggest that a committee member's general ideological orientation on the left-right dimension is not decisive for his prospects to change the committee output. Instead, it seems like ENVI members with ties to green interest groups play a greater role in the formulation of environmental policies than committee members without comparable affiliations. Finally, the empirical evidence indicates that rapporteurs are only rarely challenged successfully by competing amendments. However, they are often willing to accept compromises.

AbstractRegulations and directives are the central legal instruments used by the EU. In some instances, the Commission is not legally required to choose a specific legal instrument, but can make this decision autonomously. However, we know surprisingly little about the factors that influence this decision. Based on an original dataset of all directives and regulations proposed by the European Commission in ordinary legislative procedures between 2009 and 2018, we find that the choice of a legal instrument is strongly determined by prior policy decisions and varies systematically across policy areas depending on the extent to which they have traditionally been addressed under the co‐decision procedure. In addition, we find that the Commission's use of regulations increases under conditions of increased euroscepticism, indicating that instead of granting dissenting member states more room to manoeuvre, the Commission prefers to keep them on a short leash.

The standing committees of the European Parliament perform crucial policy-making functions and, accordingly, the question of how they are composed assumes great relevance. Unlike previous studies, which primarily looked at committee assignments from the perspective of individual MEPs, we assess the representativeness of entire committees by comparing their preference distributions with those we find in the plenary on the left/right and pro/anti EU dimension. For our analysis, we combine new data on committee memberships in the ninth European Parliament with data on policy preferences of national parties from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. In order to assess committee representativeness, we calculate the extent to which the preference distributions of committees and the plenary overlap. We show that committee representativeness is a function of committee popularity and power. Committee popularity provides party groups with a larger pool of applicants to choose from and since popular committees are often also quite large, the formation of representative committees is facilitated. Moreover, the party groups of the European Parliament have stronger incentives to form balanced committee contingents for powerful committees, resulting in higher committee representativeness. However, this latter finding is qualified by two outliers and we only find the hypothesized relationship to hold on the pro/anti EU dimension.

This article investigates the impact of policy complexity on the duration of legislative negotiations in the European Union employing survival analysis. We conceptualize policy complexity as a three-dimensional construct encompassing structural, linguistic and relational components. Building on this conceptual framework, we measure the complexity of 889 Commission proposals published under the ordinary legislative procedure between 2009 and 2018. Controlling for institutional and political drivers of legislative duration identified by previous studies, we show that different types of policy complexity influence the duration of the decision-making process in the European Union to varying degrees, at different points in time and partially in unexpected ways. On a general level, our study highlights that developing a better understanding of the origins and consequences of policy complexity in the European Union is a key task for scholars of European integration.

AbstractIn this contribution, we evaluate the effectiveness of firearm regulations in curbing the number of homicides and suicides committed both with and without firearms. We develop a gun control index that enables us to compare the restrictiveness of firearm regulations across time and space. We model the effects of gun control on figures of (gun) homicide and (gun) suicide gained from public health records in 16 West European countries between 1980 and 2010. We thus shift the analytical focus away from the United States, which can be considered an extreme case in many ways and analyze the effects of gun control in a least likely setting: a world region in which gun control is comparably strict to begin with. Our analysis demonstrates that stricter gun control entails a strong and robust negative effect not only on homicides and suicides committed with firearms, but also on overall homicide and suicide rates.