Abstract
When designing a new policy, governments across the globe consider its likely effects through impact assessment. An impact assessment is a systematic appraisal of the consequences of a policy and provides crucial evidence to legislators on whether and how to regulate. However, we have little knowledge about how impact assessments influence the work of legislators. I argue that the evidence produced by impact assessments reduces policy outcome uncertainty and derive two contrasting expectations regarding how impact assessments affect elite polarization. In the empirical analysis, I turn to the European Union and use recent developments in computational text analysis to match legislative proposals where one is accompanied by an impact assessment and the other is not. My preliminary findings suggest that impact assessments delay decision-making and increase polarization among legislators in the European Parliament. In sum, this article provides important new knowledge about the consequences of impact assessments and the role of evidence in policy-making.
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