Measuring Legislative Growth in an EU Member State: Fifty Years of Greek Primary Legislation, 1975–2024

Over recent decades, regulatory growth has become a phenomenon that characterizes the governance of the European Union. At the same time, systematic metrics of national legislative stocks, their evolution, and the rhythm of lawmaking remain scarce and are rarely available in a comparable and meaningful form. This article proposes and applies a transparent strategy for measuring legislative growth and intensity in an EU member state, taking Greece as an outstanding case. The Hellenic legal order has long been characterized by πολυνομία (too many laws), a complex mosaic of overlapping regulations widely regarded as a source of legal uncertainty and often linked to deeper cultural norms that favour formal rules as a response to uncertainty. The analysis relies on a new longitudinal dataset of all Greek primary laws published in the Official Government Gazette (FEK A') from 1975 to 2024, coinciding with the Third Hellenic Republic (the “Metapolitefsi” period). On this basis, annual indicators of legislative volume and legislative intensity are constructed (number of laws, total pages, pages per law, and variation across years and periods). The article documents the expansion of Greek primary legislation over fifty years and highlights growth trends aligned with key political, institutional, and economic phases. The article has two main goals. First, it documents key long-term patterns of legislative growth and intensity in a member state whose administrative capacity and codification/consolidation practices are frequently questioned and discusses how the continuous accumulation of law may is likely to amplify secondary legislation and implementation demands in a context where a simplification or deregulation agenda has yet to enter public debate. Second, it offers a measurement framework that can be replicated in other EU countries for comparative studies, starting from national gazettes. Researchers and practitioners can organize time series of laws, pages or standard word counts, as a minimal but robust baseline for monitoring legislative production and the growth of regulatory volume. This approach aims to produce comparable metrics that can inform simplification strategies, contribute to data-informed "better regulation" debates, and relate domestic legislative trends to EU regulatory growth.