Who says what and what gets publicly answered? Building technocratic reputation through democratic innovations in the EU system of regulatory governance.

Stakeholders’ engagement in policymaking is generally seen as a tool through which policymakers may increase their legitimacy and build a reputation for being inclusive and competent decision-makers. How bureaucratic actors and regulators handle and respond to stakeholder feedback provides relevant insights about what kind of reputation and legitimacy they wish to build with the general public or specific constituencies of interest. In this paper we explore how the European Commission (EC) interacted with and responded to stakeholder comments on the online interactive platform ‘Lighten the Load’ aimed at simplifying and modernising EU legislation as part of Commission’s Regulatory Fitness and Performance programme (REFIT). While the Commission website states that the European executive pledges to provide answers to all stakeholder comments, only some of them received public responses on behalf of the Commission. Furthermore, the substantive content of Commission replies to stakeholder comments also varies: while some comments are taken into consideration for integration into the simplification programme, others get Commission responses referring to competence or procedural matters. This raises an interesting empirical puzzle that motivates our research: what explains the European Commission’s decision to engage with and publicly answer some of stakeholders’ comments received on the ‘Lighten the Load’ platform? And, what explains the type of replies the Commission gave to these comments? Building on the literature on regulatory politics and bureaucratic reputation, we argue the Commission’s decision was informed by two possible scenarios. In the first one, the Commission had incentives to build a reputation for being an inclusive and open regulator, aiming to maximise input and throughput legitimacy. In the second one, the Commission had incentives to build a reputation for being an evidence-based, responsible regulator, aiming at maximising output legitimacy. We content that, given the politically sensitive nature of regulatory simplification, which was feared would lead to potential de-regulation in areas of environmental and consumer protection, the Commission had strong incentives to build a reputation consistent with the second scenario, indicating that its decision on regulatory simplification are informed by expert knowledge and policy evidence. We test our argument on a new dataset, recording 446 discrete comments, in a two-stage analysis. Our logistic regression models show the Commission was significantly more likely to respond to policy-related comments (relative to political ones), and to those submitted by business stakeholders. Our multinomial regression analysis shows that the EC was more likely to adopt and integrate into its REFIT proposals for legislative simplification stakeholder comments that are policy related, comments that suggest a reduction in the amount of EU regulation and comments referring to regulatory policy areas. We also find partial support for the argument suggesting that the Commission is more likely to adopt an opinion on suggestions from business stakeholders, compared to other stakeholders. This supports the claim that the Commission made strategic use of its answering and stakeholder engagement tactic on the ‘Lighten the Load’ platform to strengthen its reputation as a technocratic, responsible regulator, in line with the second scenario.