Mapping Europe’s Digital Acquis: A Granular History of EU Digital Policymaking

Over the last decade, digital policy has moved to the center of EU policymaking. Yet we lack a systematic, quantitative mapping of its nature and trajectory — one that captures digital provisions wherever they appear, not just in flagship acts. We provide such a mapping of the EU’s digital acquis from 1979 to today, decomposing every EU regulation, directive, and decision into roughly two million recitals and (sub-)articles and classifying them with a two-stage pipeline that distills a human-validated ensemble of large language models into efficient open encoder models. We find that digital policy has moved from the margins of EU lawmaking to its core: the digital share of newly adopted provisions rose from under one percent in the 1980s to roughly one in ten today, with most digital provisions dispersed far beyond the landmark acts. The rest of EU law references digital policy increasingly and disproportionately — the digital acquis forming a cohesive but not insular policy field; digital legislation has become markedly more assertive, increasingly imposing obligations and prohibitions on private actors rather than member states; and the rights it invokes are overwhelmingly civil rather than political or social. We (will soon) release our provision-level dataset, our classification models, and a Python package for building granular legislative corpora as open infrastructure for future research.