Accountability and its Limits: Designing Stakeholder Engagement in Rulemaking Across the European Union

Different series of OECD regulatory indicators have documented a widespread diffusion of policy instruments supporting stakeholder engagement in the formulation of primary and secondary legislation across the European Union. This pattern of diffusion, however, conceals subtle variation in the design of these instruments. We start from the hypothesis that design features matter for accountability outcomes. To test it, we built an original dataset of stakeholder consultation procedures across the EU-28 member states and the European Union. Methodologically, we gathered data following the rule typology developed by Elinor Ostrom in her Institutional Grammar Tool. We classified systematically provisions included in legal acts and official governmental guidelines on stakeholder consultation in terms of position, boundary, choice, information, aggregation, payoff, and scope rules. This theory-driven approach allows us to map the design features of consultation procedures going beyond the idiosyncratic approach of international organizations based on expert surveys. Drawing on this innovative dataset, we employ set-theoretic techniques to disclose how different cross-country configurations generate variation in accountability. Our findings contribute to the literature on consultation, policy design, rulemaking and ‘better regulation’. Research for this paper was funded by the European Research Council’s grant Protego, Procedural Tools for Effective Governance. Accountability; consultation; institutional grammar tool (IGT); policy instruments; regulatory indicators