Open consultations of the European Commission

The functioning of the European Union (EU) is in principle relying on representative democracy. But due to critics of democratic deficit the EU policymaking is supplemented with participatory democracy and introduction of various opportunity structures for participation of non-state actors such as organisation of public consultations by European Commission. Participation at the consultations offers citizens and other stakeholders access to policymaking fairly early in the policymaking process when solutions to major issues are yet to be determined. Although consultations are open for participation to everyone, including citizens, experts and organised interest groups, the issues consulted are often very technical and complex and demand prior knowledge of the subject. This poses a research question how biased is participation at open consultations procedures and whether it is indeed open to citizens or accessible mostly by organised interests. The main aims of the paper are: 1) identification of policy actors in open consultations procedure (i.e. what are the types of participating actors, what are their main characteristics, from which countries do they come etc.) and 2) identification of most consulted policy areas in the open consultations procedure. The timeframe for the analysis includes the years 2017 and 2018. Our assumption is that organised interests outnumber individual participants when consultations accept position papers, while individuals outnumber organised interests when structured questionnaires are prepared to gather opinion. At the same time our hypothesis is that participants predominantly come from older EU member-states (pre-2004 MS). However, this bias is more noticeable for individual participants than for organised interests.