Backdoor Neo-Corporatism? The European Commission’s Responsiveness in Online Consultations

Since 2001 the Commission has significantly extended consultative opportunities for interest groups beyond European umbrella organisations. Especially via the instrument of online consultations (organised at http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/) most new policy proposals are exposed to the attentive eye of the “general public”. This seems to indicate a change from a more corporatist to a more pluralist instrument of interest group consultation. But is this true? As many scholars have shown the Commission’s online consultations provoke broader variety of interest group ‘input’. But it is still rather unclear how the Commission deals with these statements. Theoretical expectations are ambivalent: The Commission advanced the pluralist reform, so we might expect her to comply with her own participatory program. As contributions and follow-up-documents are transparent, un-responsive behaviour can easily be detached, so the Commission might be ‘entrapped’ to perform responsive activities. But against the background of scarcity of resources/attention as well as of diverging interest group relevance we might expect a rather selective responsiveness of the Commission. To investigate the responding activities of the Commission a content analysis of contributions to four online consultations from DG Employment and DG SANCO was conducted. In a first step, all specific policy proposals were detected. Such proposals have three attributes: They are (a) undoubtedly related to a consultation’s issues and (b) requesting the Commission (c) to do something specified in a passage of their contributions. In a second step, I investigated how these specific proposals are mirrored in the Commission’s reporting and follow-up-documents (distinguishing between different kinds of receptive activities, including responsiveness). In general, the reception of the policy proposals by the Commission is low, even if much more attention is given to European umbrella organisations. In the conclusion the empirical results are discussed against the Commission’s vision to promote EU democracy through more pluralist interest groups involvement.