Stakeholder Involvement in Regulatory Governance

Abstract

Stakeholders' direct involvement in policymaking through public participation procedures has become a defining feature of contemporary regulatory governance. This direct engagement is widely promoted as a means of strengthening the legitimacy, accountability, and information quality of rulemaking. Yet its consequences for democratic governance remain contested. This panel brings together five papers that examine key research puzzles raised by stakeholders’ direct participation in policymaking: who are the affected interests in regulatory processes? How can we conceptualize and measure stakeholder involvement? What are the consequences of stakeholder involvement for the legitimacy of regulatory policymaking processes and outcomes? The contributions span diverse empirical settings: from the European Commission's policymaking to U.S. federal rulemaking and cross-national comparisons across democracies. They tackle pressing conceptual and methodological challenges, including how to operationalize stakeholders' "affectedness," detect informal business influence in regulatory policymaking, and conceptualize and measure the complexity and multidimensionality of national-level regulatory frameworks, focusing on specific stakeholder categories such as civil society organizations. Some contributions foreground the legitimacy stakes directly, asking whether citizens’ direct participation in policy formulation processes enhances the output legitimacy of supranational policymaking and whether stakeholder involvement in hybrid regulatory regimes is a double-edged sword for stakeholders' perceptions of the legitimacy of regulatory processes and outcomes. Collectively, the panel examines the fundamental tension between the normative promise of participatory governance to confer and enhance the democratic and procedural legitimacy of technocratic regulatory policymaking and the empirical challenges of securing it, by asking whether, and under what conditions, stakeholder involvement strengthens rather than erodes regulatory legitimacy.

Title	Details
A Double-Edged Sword? Stakeholder Involvement and Legitimacy in Hybrid Regulatory Regimes	View Paper Details
Operationalising Affectedness in the Study of Stakeholder Participation	View Paper Details
Behind the Scenes of Regulation: Measuring Informal Business Influence in U.S. Federal Rulemaking	View Paper Details
Does Citizens’ Participation in Supranational Policymaking Enhance the Output Legitimacy of the European Commission’s Legislative Proposals?	View Paper Details
The Expansion of Civil Society Regulation: Tackling the Challenges of Studying Legal Complexity and Redundancy Across Democracies and Over Time	View Paper Details