Who bears the burden of complexity?

EU legislation is increasing in complexity making its application and implementation more challenging for stakeholders. The consequences of this trend are however not obvious, and depend on the actors targeted. If complex laws target actors with low capacity to comply with them, legal complexity could be detrimental to the effective and uniform functioning of EU policy. If, on the other hand, legally complex provisions target actors well positioned to manage legal complexity, the trend towards increasing complexity on average might be harmless. The rising complexity coincides with a trend towards a diversification of the actors directly addressed by EU rules. Part of this trend relates to the agentification of EU legislation. Agencies, as institutions operating on the European level, are expected to have high capacity and to be particularly well positioned to handle complex legislation. On the other side of the diversification spectrum, however, private actors including individuals and enterprises are also increasingly directly targeted by EU legislation. These actors’ capacity to absorb complex rules varies far more than that of member states or EU institutions, and thus if the rules addressing them are particularly complex this might lead to differential access to rights or ability to comply with EU requirements. We conduct an empirical study of EU legislation in health and asylum policy observing which actors are targeted by more complex legislative provisions. Rather than complex articles being addressed at high-capacity actors such as agencies, we find that high legislative complexity is predominately associated with the targeting of private and potentially low capacity actors such as individuals and enterprises, with laws directly addressing agencies being of relatively lower complexity.