Interest organizations are key actors in the formulation and implementation of EU policies and policymaking. As part of drafting its recently adopted Better Regulation policy (May 2015), the European Commission consulted broadly with interest organizations, as well as with local, regional and national-level governmental bodies. Stakeholders were thus invited to provide detailed policy feedback on a set of key issues defining the process of adopting laws and designing policies within the EU, such as enhancing the quality of EU legislation, assuring its effective implementation and organizing consultations with stakeholders. In relation to this consultative process, the study asks the following: what type of regulatory regime do EU stakeholders want when deciding the procedures governing the process of supranational policymaking? And what explains stakeholders’ preferences for different regulatory styles and policy instruments aimed at delivering the EU public with better lawmaking procedures and policy outputs? To answer these questions, the study builds on theories of regulatory politics and institutional change. The study elaborates and tests empirically a theoretical framework arguing that stakeholders’ demands for different regulatory styles and policymaking instruments are a function of their status in the institutional setting and of key organizational resources. The argument is tested empirically by conducting a two-stage empirical analysis of an original dataset that provides detailed information about stakeholders’ expressed policy positions in the context of the Better Regulation policy review. With the help of item response theory models and regression analysis, the study first models and then explains empirically stakeholders’ position alignments across 44 discrete issues describing the policy debate. The findings indicate variation in levels of support for the regulatory status quo across issues and stakeholders’ consensus on the direction of policy change. This supports elite pluralist accounts of EU policymaking and shows the relevance of anticipated redistributive consequences of policy change.
