The Empowerment of European Union Agencies from 1992 to 2019

This paper provides the first comprehensive longitudinal analysis of the determinants of delegation to European Union (EU) agencies across legislation between 1992 and 2019. Using a computational linguistic method, we extract measures of delegation of executive and soft implementation powers to EU agencies from the entire post-Maastricht legislative corpus (2973 regulations and 977 directives). We examine the role of policy complexity, bureaucratic turf, and inter-institutional conflict in shaping agencies' empowerment. By systematically tracing these dynamics over three decades, we significantly refine our understanding of the political and institutional foundations of agency governance in the EU.