Research: Governance and Regulation in the EU

Our monitoring is based on the Commission's annual work programmes and the annual Joint Declaration, in which the European Parliament adds to or deletes from the Commission's proposals.

In the monitoring process, every legislative and non-legislative proposal of the Commission is included in the ZEI Monitor and observed with regard to the processing status. The work structure is oriented towards the subject-specific priorities of the Commission. As soon as initiative proposals or adopted directives, regulations or action plans are available, they are provided in the Monitor with a brief classification of their content as well as information on the processing status. In order to clearly illustrate the processing status of the individual initiatives in the European legislative procedure, the Monitor works with a traffic light system, whereby red signals that the initiative proposal has not yet been submitted; yellow stands for an ongoing ordinary legislative procedure and the blue EU flag marks that the legislative procedure has been completed or that a non-legislative proposal has been published.

Complementing the Monitor is the "Future of Europe Observer", ZEI's academic magazine, which takes stock of the implementation of the Commission's work programme on an annual basis. In addition, the Monitor is accompanied by ZEI Discussion Papers in the field of governance and regulation, which deal specifically with selected topics of EU research and offer more in-depth analyses.

The ZEI Monitor's ongoing monitoring of the European Commission's work culminates in a final evaluation in the form of an anthology, so that the entire legislative period can be subjected to a comprehensive analysis. This process was started with the Juncker Commission 2015-2019 and is currently being continued for the Von der Leyen Commission 2019-2024.