Consulting with the European Commission: How Open are Open Public Consultations?

The functioning of the European Union (EU) is in principle relying on representative democracy. But due to critics of democratic deficit the EU policymaking is supplemented with participatory democracy and introduction of various opportunity structures for participation of non-state actors. The Lisbon Treaty in article 10 defines that citizens are directly represented in the European Parliament and that “every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union”. The idea of participatory democratic model is to ensure equal access for all groups regardless of their financial, social and societal resources, already established links with decision-makers and representativeness. One of the access points to EU decision-makers by citizens are open public consultations organised by the European Commission. Participation at the consultations offers citizens and other stakeholders access to policymaking fairly early in the policymaking cycle when solutions to major issues are yet to be determined. In this way participants can have more influence on the policy outcomes compared to when they get involved during the policy adoption stage. However, consultations are organised in different ways dependent on DG that organises it. For some consultations participants can submit position papers without prior defined structure. Here mostly organised interests are capable to respond. On the other hand, some open consultations are organised as structural survey questionnaires for participants to submit their opinions. On many cases they are prepared in all official EU languages, whereas in some instances questionnaires are available only in working languages of the EU. Although consultations are open for participation to everyone, including citizens, experts and organised interest groups, the issues consulted are often very technical and complex and demand prior knowledge of the subject. This poses a research question how biased is participation at open consultations procedures and whether it is indeed open to citizens or accessible mostly by organised interests. The main aims of the paper are: 1) identification of policy actors in open consultations procedure (i.e. what are the types of participating actors, what are their main characteristics, from which countries do they come etc.), and 2) identification of most consulted policy areas in the open consultations procedure. The timeframe for the analysis includes the years 2017 and 2018, while two main reasons for the selected period are: all open consultations from this period were closed, and follow-up activities and reports on all consultations were already prepared while at the same time these consultations are still recent enough so the information on consultations are accessible. Our assumption is that organised interests outnumber individual participants when consultations accept position papers, while individuals outnumber organised interests when structured questionnaires are prepared to gather opinion. At the same time our hypothesis is that participants predominantly come from older EU member-states (pre-2004 MS). However, this bias is more noticeable for individual participants than for organised interests.