What Information Guides EU Policy Formulation - A Quantitative Analysis of References in Commission Impact Assessments

Effective policies based on previous experience and a profound understanding of the problems is an ideal that politicians and their staff generally strive towards. Formulating EU policy can be challenging considering the heterogeneity of problems and plausible solutions among its members states. The European Commission, which has the sole right of initiative, does not always have the necessary expertise internally and therefore look to external actors for insights and information in the early stages of developing policy options. Since 2003, Impact Assessments has been used by the Commission to improve the quality of Community legislation. These reports are part of the early stages of policy formulation to evaluate the potential impact of available policy options. However, it is unclear what kind of information reaches officials within the Commission. By examining references and citations in more than 1000 Impact Assessment spanning all policy domains over 20 years, the role of information and evidence in different policy domains is examined. The policy domains are signified by different levels of technicality and maturity, enabling an analysis of how information is used to justify policy options in policy domains with distinct characteristics. Using a quantitative approach, this article gives an overview of the information referenced in Commission Impact Assessments and examines whether the nature of EU policy domains impact what information is referenced. The results show that the European Commission mostly reference internal documents and reports when formulating policy options, even in highly technical policy domains. Meanwhile, peer-reviewed research articles are seldom utilized. This, in combination with the high status of evidence-based policymaking, risk creating biases in the Impact Assessments. Something that could be problematic, since these documents are referenced frequently as a baseline throughout the policy process.