Measuring and Comparing the Europeanization of National Legislation: A Research Note

There is an urgent need for a method to measure quantitatively the Europeanization of national public policies, meaning the scope and extent to which national policies are shaped by European law and policy. Research on the Europeanization of public policies has so far mostly been limited to qualitative analysis. While such case studies, or comparative case or country studies have produced valuable insights into the nature of Europeanization, the challenge to measure how much national policy‐making has been influenced by European law and policies has not yet been mastered by the discipline. After outlining both the scholarly and the political context of the debate, the article briefly discusses different methods that have been developed so far to measure the Europeanization of national legislation in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, France and Germany. Their common feature is that they aim to measure Europeanization – and that they do so by using diverse methods and measures. Not only do they display some flaws in how they measure the Europeanization of legislation, but the results of these diverse studies are by no means comparable. Based on a short discussion of these approaches that have been developed so far, I will outline how this challenge could be faced. I will then present a concept for the development of an analytical tool to measure the scope and extent of the Europeanization of national public policies across policy fields, time and countries, as a means of improving our knowledge and as a starting point for explaining variance across policy fields, across time and, most interesting, across countries. Finally more and less fundamental objections to this enterprise are discussed.