How regulatory officials cope with stakeholder pressure. The effect of politicization, elite networks, and issue characteristics

The issue of how regulatory officials engage with political and societal stakeholders is at its core a question of keeping a proper distance vis-à-vis stakeholders while simultaneously ensuring an effective information inflow. In particular in times of increasing politicization, regulatory officials face serious challenges to balance the inflow of expertise with political as well as societal pressures. In this paper, we examine how issue characteristics, interest group embeddedness in elite networks, and politicization explain how regulatory officials cope with stakeholder pressure. We employ an issue-centered research design allowing us to study such coping mechanism by regulatory officials regarding the same set of regulatory policy-making processes. We draw on a novel dataset of 85 in-depth interviews with both officials and stakeholders covering a set of more than 40 EU regulations. The issue-centered design allows us to both unravel internal organizational routines as well as issue characteristics explaining how regulatory officials cope with stakeholder pressure. Our findings contribute to the literatures on regulatory capture, the role of regulatory intermediates, responsive and participatory regulatory governance