What do the regulated want? Explaining stakeholders’ preferences for a Better Regulation policy in the European Union

The recent reform of the Better Regulation policy in the EU stirred public debate and controversy on two grounds: its potential to affect the EU inter-institutional balance of power and its deregulatory consequence in key areas of public interest such as environment or public health. The initiative required a fine balancing act between considerations for political legitimacy and policy effectiveness, economic competitiveness and maintaining regulatory standards in areas of public interest, the quality and quantity of EU regulation. This suggests a reform process marked by substantial controversy among its key stakeholders. In relation to this we ask the following: what explains stakeholders’ position alignments in the reform of the EU Better Regulation policy? We answer by examining empirically the positions expressed by stakeholders in the open consultation organised by the European Commission in 2012, during the initial stages of the reform process. We argue that within the EU, especially after 2005, and in the context of the last economic recession, the Better Regulation policy had a strong focus on enhancing economic competitiveness and growth. We test the argument that business organizations and national public authorities were more supportive of strengthening the policy than organizations representing public interests, while also being more active in making recommendations for how the policy can be further consolidated and improved. As an alternative explanation, we examine the argument that stakeholders with broader cross-sectoral interests are more likely to support the status quo and to make suggestions for policy improvement. Our results indicate a moderate and variegated effect of interest type and number of policy areas of interest to individual stakeholders on their assessment of the status quo, but a strong effect of these two explanatory variables on stakeholders’ propensity to make recommendations for policy improvement and change. Stakeholders differed most significantly in their positioning on evaluating the status quo of the EU consultation regime, while fewer systematic differences could be observed in their positioning on the evaluation of the quality of EU legislation and its implementation. Business organizations were significantly more likely to make recommendations for improving the consultation regime. Organizations with broader cross-sectorial interests were more likely to make more recommendations for the overall improvement of Better Regulation. We contribute to the scholarship on regulatory governance, supranational policymaking and policy lobbying and systems of interest representation. Theoretically, we elaborate an argument that carefully considers different logics and policy scenarios in the distribution of stakeholders’ positions on the policy spectrum that may explain systematic patterns of position alignments. We address an under-research question and propose a fine-grained empirical analysis at issue level that allows observing systematic differences in stakeholders’ positioning on key dimensions of the EU Better Regulation policy. We also contribute to the development of policy research by proposing a quantitative analysis examining systematically a key instrument of this policy, namely stakeholders’ public consultations. This goes at the heart of a key issue of Better Regulation: how to best examine and process stakeholders’ policy feedback in a scientific, systematic and reliable manner.