Effects of E-Consultations in Croatia on Improving Government Responsiveness to Policy Inputs of Interest Groups

The paper explores the effects of the use of Croatian central government e-consultations platform on the overall responsiveness of ministries to policy inputs of interest groups. Ever since its launch in April 2015, e-consultations platform has become compulsory for the use by all government bodies for conducting public consultations on draft laws, other regulations and acts, generating an ever growing interest of citizens and most powerful interest groups in the country for using this formal channel of influence on policy making processes. The unique feature of this platform is in its enabling an open monitoring of all policy inputs of interest groups and responses of ministries to received inputs, with an elaboration of reasons for accepting or rejecting individual amendments. Its consistent use by all government bodies has opened the space for the analysis of the quality of processing of received policy inputs and the degree on influence of different interest groups and individual citizens on final outcomes of the policy proposals. In addition to the quantitative analysis of processing of received policy inputs in the first three years of the use of e-consultations by all government bodies, the paper analyzes more particularly the qualitative aspects of public consultations in the area of education, with specific emphasis on the quality of elaboration of reasons for not accepting certain inputs, but also reflecting on the success of different interest groups in terms of number of accepted policy inputs by the competent ministry. The paper seeks to offer new perspectives on the still under-researched area of the quality of response of government bodies to policy inputs of interest groups in Croatia.