What Affects Speed the Most? Exploring the Influence of External Actors on EU Legislative Decision-Making Speed

Studies on the political factors influencing the legislative decision-making process in the European Union have not paid much attention to which factor affects decision-making speed the most. This article examines the involvement of stakeholders that affect the legislative decision-making speed from the perspective of the dynamics between external actors and member states’ preferences. We hypothesize that interest groups might not only directly interfere with the decision-making speed by consultations in policy preparation but also indirectly affect the speed through the interaction effect between external actors and member states. We test the hypotheses with a new dataset of 100 legislative acts covering all EU member states with 9701 observations across 100 European Commission consultations among 16 policy areas. Our regression analysis provides evidence for a correlation that stakeholders involved in the preparation of legislation indeed increases the decision-making duration to some degree. However, whether there is a causal effect that the speed would be directly and indirectly slowed down under the circumstance of preference heterogeneity among stakeholders still needs further argumentation.