Regulating the Regulators: Revising the European Commission’s Public Consultations Regime

Consultations with stakeholders have become a well-established policy practice and a key instrument used by the European Commission to increase the quality of its policy proposals, assure compliance with EU legislation and boost its bargaining power in the EU legislative decision-making. Commission officials have considerable discretion to decide the consultation regime employed for drafting proposals and how to proceed and set up the organisation of public consultations with organisational stakeholders and citizens. Yet recently, the European executive has initiated a set of measures aimed to review its consultation regime and to design a more institutionalized set of rules and procedures regulating the manner in which European Commission policy officers decide to organise their dialogue with stakeholders in the design of legislative proposals and to receive their policy feedback. The study argues that the newly adopted measures are a step forward towards rationalizing and bureaucratizing the consultative process, and implicitly a significant move away from allowing interferences of political actors within the Commission in deciding the organisation of this consultative process. The empirical analysis is conducted on an original, built-for-purpose dataset providing detailed information about policy issues and the policy positions of main organisational and institutional actors in two recent decision-making events leading to the review and reform of the Commission’s consultation regime and policy of receiving policy feedback from concerned stakeholders. The findings indicate that the European executive made significant and constant attempts towards further institutionalizing and rationalizing its dialogue with interest organisations, but that this change also serves a political purpose, namely that of maintaining or increasing its political power in EU decision-making given the treaty changes conferring the European Parliament more legislative power. Interest organisations are found to be strong supporters of this further institutionalisation of consultations design.