Stakeholder Participation in Bureaucratic Politics and Policymaking

The participation of stakeholders (citizens and interest groups) in public policymaking represents a key feature of 21st century systems of democratic governance (OECD 2022). This development is particularly relevant for non-majoritarian institutions such as executive bureaucracies and regulatory agencies for which stakeholder participation represents a unique opportunity to address their democratic deficit and consolidate their institutional power, legitimacy and reputation (Braun & Busuioc, 2020). The rise of stakeholder participation in policymaking was matched by increasing levels of academic attention and scholarship dispersed across different subfields of political science (Bunea 2020a). For example, interest group research mostly examines the role of public consultations as venues of interest representation and influence over policymaking (Bunea 2013, Klüver 2013, Rasmussen et al. 2014). Public policy scholarship considers stakeholder participation an important instrument for better regulation reforms aimed at enhancing the evidence-based and the participatory and deliberative credentials of regulatory policymaking (Rimkutė 2020a, Bunea and Chrisp 2022). Public administration scholarship emphasizes the role of stakeholder participation as an administrative procedure with important implications for interinstitutional relations and the politics of bureaucratic discretion, reputation and autonomy (Braun 2012, Moffitt 2014, Potter 2019, Rimkutė, 2020, Bunea 2020b, Bunea and Nørbech 2022, Rimkutė 2020b). A critical overview of existing research reveals that current studies have largely talked past each other, although they investigate closely related aspects of citizen and interest groups’ participation in public policymaking. Consequently, the impact of stakeholder participation on bureaucratic policymaking has remained largely under-theorized and empirically underexamined. Several factors account for this gap. First, across subfields of political science, scholars employ different assumptions about and definitions of stakeholder participation in policymaking. This in turn poses important challenges to academic dialogue and to the cumulative progress of research and knowledge about the impact of stakeholder participation on bureaucratic politics and policymaking. Second, existing research provides only fragmented and insufficiently developed causal mechanisms regarding the direct and indirect effects of stakeholder participation on the inputs, processes, and outputs of bureaucratic policymaking. Together, this results in limited analytical leverage of existing theoretical models and empirical research, which fails to match the societal and political relevance attributed to stakeholder participation in contemporary democratic systems of governance. Our Workshop aims to address this challenge. To build a more integrative and comprehensive approach to the systematic study of stakeholder participation in bureaucratic politics and policymaking, we invite Papers tackling one or several of the following themes: 1. Stakeholder participation as an institution of bureaucratic politics and policymaking 2. Impact of stakeholder participation on bureaucratic politics and policymaking 3. Challenges and opportunities of stakeholder participation for non-majoritarian institutions in the inter-institutional balance of power 4. Methodological advancements in the comparative study of stakeholder participation in executive policymaking