Institutional Constraints, Legislative Activism, and Policy Change: The Case of the European Union

This paper studies how institutional constraints affect legislative activism, and how legislative activism affects policy change, analyzing the case of the European Union’s legislative process. Our argument revolves around the key role of the Commission in advancing policy change, and emphasizes that the Commission can successfully push for increased policy change by increasing its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space widens. Using a novel panel dataset covering eight policy sectors from 1984--‐2012, we find that the number of legislative proposals significantly affects the extent of regulatory reform in the EU. The rise in the number of legislative proposal, in turn, is affected by the extent of gridlock between the EU’s legislative bodies. These findings show that the Commission steps up its legislative activity when the institutional opportunity space allows for greater policy change.