The EU Impact on Turkish Legal Order: A Quantitative Insight

The statement that 80 percent of national legislation would originate from the EU law had been taken for granted until recent research on certain EU Member States demonstrated that the real figures were around 20-30 per cent. Yet, research on the measurement of the EU impact on domestic legislatures of candidate states is lacking and the Turkish case has not come under the spotlight of such quantitative analysis. This paper maps the Turkish legislative output through a quantitative content analysis of all domestic laws per initiator and policy area for the period between 2000-2012. Manual coding is applied as the measurement approach to reveal to what extent and in which policy areas the EU impulse exists in legislative output. Other control instruments including parliamentary questions are used to provide variation in indicators. The methodological design is complemented by in-depth interviews with law-makers. By assessing the EU link in Turkish legislature, the research provides new insights on quantitative research of the EU impact.