Comparing patterns of stakeholder participation in bureaucratic policymaking: explaining cross-domain differences

Recent years have seen a significant growth in stakeholder participation across all stages of bureaucratic policy making. This increasingly decentralised policy process has been seen by some as a transition from “the age of bureaucratic governance to the age of network governance” (Sørensen 2002: 693). Vibrant bodies of research studying policy advice (Albert and Manwaring 2019), interest groups (Bunea et al. 2022) and policy networks (Howlett et al. 2017) have emerged in an attempt to make sense of these complex stakeholder-bureaucratic interactions. Empirically, studies have largely focused on the US, the EU and a handful of Western European countries where more inclusive styles of policy making have well-established traditions. Stakeholder participation in bureaucratic policy making in Eastern and Central European countries, on the other hand, has received more limited attention largely due to long-standing assumptions about the weakness and underdevelopment of post-communist civil societies (Howard 2003). Where empirical accounts do exist though, they demonstrate that the reality of stakeholder-bureaucratic interactions in the region is much more dynamic and merits further exploration (e.g. Kluvánková-Oravská et al. 2009, Cox and Gallai 2014, Rozbicka et al. 2021). Such studies, however, remain relatively few and mostly focus on single case studies (Cox and Gallai 2014) or cross-country comparisons (Dimitrova and Buzogány 2014) and do not delve into the cross-domain differences, although such differentiation has been found to exist and to hold significant explanatory value elsewhere (Bunea et al. 2022). In order to address this gap, we take Bulgaria as our case study and empirically examine the networks of stakeholder-bureaucratic interactions in two distinctly different policy domains, namely energy and environmental policy and social policy. Those policy subsystems have been chosen as they display markedly different patterns of stakeholder interactions. As such, they provide a valuable illustration of different dynamics at play in Bulgaria as well as a suitable starting point for examining the factors explaining cross-domain differences. Specifically, the paper addresses the following research questions: • What are the dynamics of stakeholder-bureaucratic interactions in policy making in Bulgaria and how do they differ across policy domains? • What accounts for these cross-domain differences and how do they affect bureaucratic policy making and the influence of different stakeholders in it? The paper utilises a mixed-method research design combining social network analysis (SNA) and qualitative analysis of 49 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from across both subsystems. The SNA allows us to map the patterns of interaction between the various (state and non-state) stakeholders active during the policy making process and identify the key actors (nodes) in those networks. The in-depth qualitative data is then used to analyse those patterns, their drivers and the implications for the policy making process. The paper represents a contribution to the workshop as it offers comparative empirical insights into the stakeholder-bureaucratic interactions underpinning the policy making process in a previously understudied political context. It does so through a mixed-method approach which is rarely employed in the literature and will allow us to comprehensively compare the two cases.