Explaining the presence and quantity of citizen participation in the European Commission’s consultation regime

Citizen participation in policymaking can be a key source of legitimacy for unelected bureaucracies with executive powers like the European Commission. Despite the stated goal of the Commission’s Better Regulation Agenda (BRA) to improve and increase citizens’ participation in its policy formulation processes through online public consultations and feedback mechanisms, we currently lack a systematic analysis of the factors shaping and driving citizen’s participation in the formulation stages of supranational policymaking. This study asks which factors shape and explain the presence and extent of citizen participation in the European Commission’s consultation regime across policy initiatives and policy areas? The paper combines more traditional theories of citizen participation with theories of interest group mobilization in order to examine empirically and answer this research question. This paper argues that the complexity and salience of the policy issues consulted on is likely to affect the mobilization of citizens, as well as the resource-intensity of the consultation format. The paper also considers the impact of the Commission’s active efforts to mobilize and encourage citizen participation on their actual involvement in policymaking. The argument is tested on an original dataset describing citizen participation during different stages of the formulation of more than 400 legislative proposals adopted by the European executive during 2016-2021.