Do consultations matter for stakeholder support for policy proposals? Evidence from the European Union

Abstract

Speaker: Adriana Bunea, University of Bergen Discussant: Daniel Devine, University of Southampton A key assumption made in the literature on participatory governance is that there is a positive relationship between the presence and extent of stakeholder participation and the levels of support for policies formulated with the help of stakeholder consultations. This relationship is generally assumed and only seldomly tested empirically. We address this gap in research and ask: to what extent do consultations matter for levels of stakeholder support for policies formulated through stakeholder participation in policymaking? We build on theories of participatory governance and procedural fairness and elaborate an argument recognising the importance of consultations as tools for interest representation and procedural legitimacy in bureaucratic policymaking. We argue that stakeholders are more likely to support policies when their interest were strongly represented in consultations and when policymakers can make a credible claim that the consultation process was inclusive, transparent and attentive to stakeholder demands. We test our argument on a new dataset containing information about 316 policy proposals formulated by the European Commission during 2017-2021, in relation to which 8,954 stakeholder comments were received. We find that the strength of interest representation during consultations positively impacts levels of stakeholder support but only for consultations taking place early on during the agenda-setting stage of the policy process. In line with our expectation, we also find that stakeholders’ support is higher for proposals on which the consultation process was more open and inclusive. We find no systematic association between levels of support and levels of consultation transparency and attentiveness to stakeholder inputs. Our findings highlight the importance of consultations as venues of interest representation and the challenges of reconciling input and output legitimacy. They underscore the limits of using stakeholder involvement as a strategy to build procedural legitimacy, and emphasize the complex relationship between input, process and output legitimacy in participatory governance and bureaucratic policymaking.