Legislative Proposals in the European Union, 1965-2013

The data set was originally created in 2004 to identify legislative proposals that were pending in the Council of the European Union (Warntjen 2007). It was created by extracting data from the European Union's Prelex data set, which as of December 2014 is no longer available (it was merged with Eurlex), using a script written in Perl. The point of departure was to identify Commission proposal via their COM-number. However, not all documents with a COM-number are legislative proposals. The data set includes one variable (type) which helps to exclude reports and communications from the Commission. The variable procedure can also be used to filter out non-legislative procedures. Prelex seemed to have incomplete coverage of legislative procedures before 1984. This version is an update run in September 2013. I did not perform any cross validation or data cleaning for the update, so due to changes in Prelex some entries might no longer be accurate or might now be mainly missing for the last couple of years. Frank Haege's EUPOL (http://frankhaege.eu/data/eupol) is a more complete and up-to-date version of the Prelex data base. This data set might however still be useful for validation purposes. For other data sets on EU legislation, consult: http://www.elprg.eu/data.htm#Inter-institutional_decision-making