Winning Back the Hearts of European Citizens? Public Politicisation of European Integration and the Commission’s Responsiveness to Diffuse Societal Interests

The European Union has recently experienced periods of intense public politicization. Supranational activity is much more visible, public opinion diversifies, and political demands towards the supranational level are openly advanced. This challenges the technocratic mode of policy preparation in the European Commission. The paper argues that higher levels of societal contestation render the diffuse public a more relevant Commission stakeholder because future transfers of competences are more likely to be scrutinized in the public realm. For specific Commission DGs, this creates incentives to pander to widely dispersed interests in their policy choices, in particular where a regulatory initiative is publicly salient at the time of drafting. Based on novel quantitative indicators for politicisation and issue salience, the paper scrutinizes this claim in a comparative case-study design. It re-constructs four drafting processes in consumer policy during 1999-2008 and combines information from internal process documentation, stakeholder positions, press coverage and a set of face-to-face interviews with involved Commission officials. The findings show that the Commission adapts the distribution of rights between the narrow set of producer interests and the mass of European consumers to the ups and downs of politicisation and issue salience. The more the politics and policies of European integration are contested, the more the Commission responds to the demands of diffuse societal interest from the consumer side. Commission responsiveness should not be overstated, however. On the one hand, the findings show that it is constrained by internal turf conflicts and anticipated Council preferences. On the other hand, distributing individual rights to consumers is an easy case for the Commission where narrowly concentrated and widely dispersed interests are clearly distinguishable. But where policy choices touch upon more polarised conflict dimensions, the theoretical model predicts blame avoidance behaviour and regulatory stalemate rather than enhanced responsiveness.