The European Union’s popular legitimacy, even more so after the outcome of the UK referendum,
depends to a large extent on its effective capacity to successfully deliver good outcomes as a policyshaper and law-maker. In order to increase both the legitimacy and effectiveness of its action, the European Commission, over the past decade, has continuously stepped up its efforts to integrate stakeholders and concerned citizens in the preparation of new legislation. This practice goes back to its White Paper on European Governance published in July 2001. Concurrently, the European Parliament has, from its side, built up several instruments to scrutinise the Commission’s activities, using its own independent sources of evidence and expertise.

Within the preparatory and scrutiny processes of both the Commission and the European Parliament, policy proposals, legislative acts and implementation arrangements are increasingly assessed and evaluated on the basis of factual evidence and statistical data. Such evidence-based monitoring is increasingly recognised as a complex steering mode in itself that resulted from changing governance patterns due to Europeanisation and supranationalisation. In this view, evidence-based policy-making reflects the need to re-structure the interaction of political actors of different institutional origin and political levels and represents an influential policy instrument at the border of the politics and policy dimensions of EU’s multilevel legislative process.

The EP-EUI Policy Roundtable took stock of the recent developments in Parliament’s involvement in this sort of evaluation of European governance, including various tools of impact and implementation assessment, scientific evaluation and the policy-oriented use of large data resources. The main purpose of the roundtable was to provide fresh ideas on how to develop a convincing toolbox for setting priorities, including critical assessments of the limits of empirical and data evidence in defining new policies.

Photos and recording of panels from the roundtable can be found on the event page.

PROGRAMME