In today’s rapidly changing world, governance must be designed to adapt swiftly. While international organizations like the OECD have advocated more agile, adaptive, and experimentalist approaches, academic studies have largely focused on conceptual definitions and small-N case studies. As a result, our understanding of whether and how governance is becoming dynamic by design remains limited. This paper addresses this gap by conducting a large-scale comparative analysis of EU rules, spanning legislative acts, implementing and delegated acts, and soft law across all sectors from 1993 to 2023. By employing computational methods, particularly dependency parsing in natural language processing (NLP), we systematically assess key instruments for dynamism, namely provisions enabling rule review and revision. Our findings challenge three major assumptions drawn from the literature. First, while rules are gradually becoming more dynamic, provisions for review and revise remain rare. Second, cross-sectoral analysis reveals that even in high-volatility domains such as climate change, dynamic rules are the exception rather than the norm. Third, contrary to expectations, lower-tier norms are less, not more, dynamic. Overall, our findings suggest that regulatory design has not kept pace with the dynamism theorized and advocated by scholars and policymakers.
