The who and the what of stakeholder consultations: comparing stakeholder participation and feedback responses in the EU’s new consultation regime

Faced with concerns about its democratic legitimacy and accountability, the European Commission has significantly expanded its stakeholder consultation regime in recent years to engage the public at every stage of its policy formulation and policy implementation processes. This procedural overhaul sought to increase the accessibility, transparency and interactivity of stakeholder consultations, while marshalling the information provided as feedback to improve the quality of decision-making. Crucially, the new consultations invite open-ended text feedback rather than (mostly) closed-ended questionnaires designed by Commission, which creates significant heterogeneity in the substantive feedback the Commission receives and in the participation behaviour of stakeholders. Thus, in this study, we develop a theoretical framework and methodological approach to explain stakeholders’ participatory behaviour and the informational quality of the feedback they provided as part of the overhauled consultation regime. We employ a new dataset constructed from roughly 14,000 feedback responses provided by stakeholders between 2016 and 2019, across all EU policy areas to 1,200 consultation events. We develop two sets of indicators to capture the variation in stakeholders’ participatory behaviour and the variation in the levels of information quality of their submitted comments. We empirically test the effect of institutional and stakeholder characteristics on these two sets of indicators capturing the participatory and informational dimensions of the new EC consultation regime. Our study provides valuable insights to key debates in the literatures on lobbying interest groups, participatory governance and EU politics and policymaking.