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Since 2005, the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) of Sciences Po has built an innovative project on the European Union (EU) legislative process. The Observatory of European Institutions (OEI) aims at better understanding the evolution of the legislative process in the EU since 1996. The goals of the Observatory are threefold. First, it aims at a better understanding of the political process through an innovative and wide-coverage database. For each adopted legislative act, about 100 variables are collected, each of them providing detail on the decision making in the EU and its Member States. Second, the Observatory values comparative approaches. The dataset allows for an in-depth analysis of each policy sector. All in all, the information in the Observatory opens up a number of new research opportunities such as the impact of new Treaties, institutional reforms or the ongoing economic and political crisis, on each policy sector. The dataset has been built up thanks to a French National Research Agency Funding (Agence nationale de la recherche) (2012-2015, ANR-12-BSH1-0012).