Frank M. Häge

The European Union Policy-Making (EUPOL) dataset

The EUPOL dataset includes virtually all information contained in the European Commission’s online database PreLex. The mission of PreLex is to monitor the inter-institutional decision-making process of the EU, providing information about various formal events and institutional actors involved in policy-making, as well as cross-references to documents contained in other online databases. In combination with its long-term coverage since the mid 1970s, PreLex is a useful database for studies of EU politics. The EUPOL dataset provides the complete information contained in PreLex in a standardized and machine-readable format. Overall, the latest version of the dataset consists of more than 31,000 decision-making cases, whose features are described by about 2,700 variables. For further information, please see the relevant blog posts.

Dataset description (please cite when using the dataset)

• Häge, Frank M. (2011): The European Union Policy-Making Dataset. European Union Politics 12, 3: 455-477. (supporting information; replication archive)

Dataset

EUPOL v03 (1975-2011), raw information downloaded 17-18 January 2012

• Summary statistics (xls)
• Stata do-files for generation of summary statistics

  management02 (do)

  analysis01 (do)

• Data (zip file; 9 MB)
• Source files (zip file; 188 MB)
• Download script (txt)
• Extraction script (txt)
• Storage script (txt)

EUPOL v02 (1975-2010), raw information downloaded 7-10 May 2011

• Summary statistics (xls)
• Data (zip file; 9 MB)
• Source files (zip file; 171 MB)

EUPOL v01 (1975-2009), raw information downloaded 8-9 April 2010

• Data (zip file; 12 MB)
• Source files (zip file; 166 MB)
• Download script (txt)
• Extraction script (txt)
• Storage script (txt)

Software

The scripts to download, extract, and store the information from PreLex were written in Python 2.6.5, using ActiveState’s PythonWin editor. The scripts rely on the following external Python modules: BeautifulSoup, ClientForm, and Mechanize.

Credits

The computer scripts used to generate the dataset were to a large extent written while I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Public Administration at Leiden University in 2008. The postdoctoral fellowship was co-funded by the Netherlands Institute of Government.

Cross-validation

The table below shows a comparison of the aggregate numbers on the type of legislative procedure coded from the EUPOL v01 and LawLeecher (Kovats 2010) datasets, respectively. While the match is not perfect, the comparison indicates no major discrepancies between the two datasets. The differences are most likely due to slightly different coding decisions rather than differences in the originally extracted information. Therefore, these preliminary results provide us with some confidence in the validity of the two independently programmed extraction procedures.