Evaluation capacity in the European Commission

Abstract

Ex-post evaluations are a potential tool to improve regulatory interventions and to hold rule-makers accountable. For these reasons the European Commission has promised to systematically evaluate its legislation, but it remains unclear if actual evaluation capacity is being built up in the Commission’s Directorates-General. This article describes and explains the variation in evaluation capacity between the Directorates-Generals by applying a theoretical model of evaluation capacity developed by Nielsen et al. to the European context. To gain an in-depth understanding of the Directorates-Generals’ evaluation capacity, 20 Commission officials were interviewed. The results show that there is much variation in the extent to which Directorates-Generals prioritize evaluation as well as in the amount of human and technological capital that they invest in evaluation. Further analysis using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis reveals that part of this variation can be explained by the Directorates-Generals’ total budgets, suggesting that Directorates-Generals with a tradition of evaluating spending programmes also attach more importance to legislative evaluations.