Over the past decades, the European Union (EU) has experienced substantial regulatory expansion. A growing literature has analysed its drivers, institutional foundations, and consequences. Yet, a striking feature of EU governance remains underexplored: regulatory expansion has consistently coexisted with repeated but largely unsuccessful attempts at simplification. Despite decades of simplification initiatives under the Better Regulation agenda, the overall regulatory stock and its complexity continue to grow.
This special issue shifts the analytical focus from why rules expand to why they are so difficult to reduce. Most importantly, the special issue departs from the assumption that simplification is not merely a technocratic exercise but a deeply political process, shaped by distributional conflicts, competing normative visions, and strategic behaviour. By analysing simplification as a contested and often hidden dimension of EU governance, this special issue brings together research on European integration, regulatory governance, political economy and policy complexity.
We invite contributions that examine regulatory simplification in relation to deregulation, Better Regulation, policy accumulation and growth, and administrative burden. The special issue welcomes research from different methodological traditions, including qualitative, interview-based, and process-tracing research that provides in-depth insights into the political dynamics underpinning regulatory governance; quantitative and computational approaches such as text analysis and large language models; and mixed-methods and theoretically informed empirical contributions. Importantly, submissions from scholars at all career stages, including early-career researchers, are welcome.