Representation or Information? Understanding EU’s New ‘Ubiquitous’ Consultations

• In Event: Assessing Inclusion and Diversity in the Policy Process

Abstract

Faced with concerns about its democratic legitimacy and accountability, the European Commission recently expanded its stakeholder consultation regime to engage the public at every stage of its policy formulation and policy implementation processes, from roadmaps and inception impact assessments to legislative proposals and delegated and implementing acts. This procedural overhaul sought to increase the accessibility, transparency and interactivity of stakeholder consultations, while marshalling the information provided as feedback to improve the quality of decision-making. In this study, we unpick the heterogeneous aims of the EC’s new ‘ubiquitous’ consultation regime and ask whether the expansion of participation equates to the ideals of democratic fora or evidence-based policymaking. We develop a theoretical argument explaining how stakeholder consultations perform as channels of participation and information provision in the context of bureaucratic policymaking and how the policy stage and type of legislative act on which stakeholders are consulted shape the plurality and information quality of their policy engagement. We employ a new dataset constructed from over 60,000 feedback responses provided by stakeholders between 2016 and 2019, across all EU policy areas to 1,200 consultation events. We examine the patterns of stakeholder participation and with the help of quantitative text analysis we estimate the informational value of stakeholders’ submission at consultation-event level. We construct two indexes capturing the participatory and informational quality of individual consultation events and with the help of cluster analysis we identify clusters of consultations based on the observed levels of stakeholder participation and the informational quality of their policy input. we then explain cluster-membership with the help of regression analysis. Our study provides valuable insights to key debates in the literatures on regulatory governance, democratic innovations and EU politics.

Authors

• Adriana Bunea, University of Bergen

• Joe Chrisp, University of Bergen