Who wrote Europe’s digital rulebook? Institutional authorship and the balance of power in EU digital regulation

Who shapes EU legislation when rules acquire constitution-like significance for the digital environment? This article examines institutional authorship across five central regulations of the European Union’s post-2020 digital legislative package: the Data Governance Act, Data Act, Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, and Artificial Intelligence Act. Combining textual distance measures with a hand-coded dataset of 493 Parliament and Council amendments, it shows that the Council is the more efficient co-legislator: its positions are systematically closer to final texts and 96.4% of its proposals are adopted, against 74.4% for Parliament. Yet in absolute terms the two institutions contribute almost equally, and Parliament is the largest contributor to the Artificial Intelligence Act. The results reveal an asymmetrical functional differentiation: the Council shapes how European Union rules work operationally, while Parliament shapes what they stand for normatively, with direct implications for the democratic legitimacy of European Union lawmaking.