The Politics of Better Regulation: Institutional and Discursive Change in EU Governance

As the European Union faces growing regulatory complexity and rising expectations for effective and legitimate governance, its approach to lawmaking has become a crucial site of political and institutional contestation. The EU’s Better Regulation agenda exemplifies these tensions: originally promoted as a framework for transparency, participation, and evidence-based policymaking, it has gradually shifted towards substantial simplification and increased deregulation, resulting in the recent Omnibus legislation. Yet despite this turn, we still know little about how the agenda has evolved and how the meaning of “better” regulation has changed over time. This study fills this gap by tracing the development of Better Regulation from 2001 to 2025 using discursive institutionalism and policy instrumentation theory. Drawing on systematic qualitative content analysis of EU documents combined with elite interviews, it identifies three distinct phases across successive Commissions. The findings reveal a gradual but profound transformation from participatory and inclusiveness-based governance towards an efficiency-driven approach centred on quantifiable instruments such as regulatory offsetting, reinforced by the EU’s broader simplification agenda. Ultimately, the study shows how technocratic reforms have redefined legitimacy in EU governance—replacing procedural inclusion with managerial performance and privileging economic over social and environmental objectives.