EUREG · Unveiling EU Regulatory Design: A Content-Oriented Analysis of Regulation in the European Union

A major challenge of the regulatory governance scholarship is to develop effective measures for capturing the content of regulation. In European Union (EU) studies, the lack of content-based measures of regulation impedes the ability to analyze regulatory designs across diverse policy areas; explain whether regulatory design choices are driven by euroscepticism, institutional, or sectorial factors; and investigate how configurations of regulatory design elements affect transposition dynamics. Addressing these challenges, EUREG’s main objective is to analyze and explain the variation of regulatory designs across EU policy areas and investigate their transposition through a content-based analysis of EU rules. Leveraging on my experience in computational text analysis along with scientific and transferable skills training, I introduce a new unit of analysis of regulation, the regulative statement, and analyze four content elements of regulatory design: actors, stringency, aims, and issues. This approach is applied to analyzing EU regulatory design across 21 policy areas from 1993 to 2023 through computational text analysis, explaining its variation through panel analysis, and investigating the transposition of environmental regulatory design through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. EUREG’s efforts have scientific, societal, and economic impacts. Scientifically, it introduces a unique measure of regulation and advances original theoretical arguments about the origins and effects of EU regulatory design. Societally and economically, it simplifies EU rules and improves the assessment of EU regulatory burden, aligning with the core missions of the European Commission’s Better Regulation Agenda. The facilities and mentorship provided by the host institution (LMU; Prof. Christoph Knill) and the secondment institution (UAntwerpen; Prof. Koen Verhoest) will contribute to achieving EUREG's objectives and fostering my development as an independent researcher.