Journal Articles

Evaluation capacity in the European Commission

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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.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Evaluation

Call Number

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Publisher

Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications., 2017

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

13563890

Classification

NONE

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Volume 23, Issue 1, January 2017; pp. 24–41

Subject(s)

European Commission
Comparative Analysis
Legislation
Legislative evaluation
evaluation capacity

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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