Mapping Influence in Stakeholder Consultations: A Comparison of Different Approaches

Consultations are routinely used by governmental entities to involve societal stakeholders in public decision-making. While governments typically claim that the views of stakeholders are taking account when revising policy proposals, others see stakeholder consultations as mere window-dressing with limited effect on policy. To settle this controversy, several studies have tried to map how much influence stakeholders gain through their participation in consultations. This is crucial not only to map the overall effect of stakeholder consultations, but also the extent to which different types of stakeholders are able to affect policy proposals. A challenge in this literature is to arrive at valid conclusions about the extent to which stakeholders are influential across a large number of consultations. Some studies rely on surveys asking stakeholders about their level of influence across different consultations, others use government reports to map stakeholder influence and yet others rely on computer assisted text analysis to compare documents at different stages in the policy process. This paper discusses and empirically compares different approaches to map the influence of stakeholders in consultations. We rely on a new dataset encompassing all stakeholder consultations carried out with respect to Danish bills in the parliamentary year 2021/22. The advantage of this empirical focus is that the ministry in charge of the stakeholder consultation routinely prepares a consultation document specifying the response to each suggestion from the consulted stakeholders. We are therefore able to compare: 1) Official government statements about accommodation of stakeholder demands, 2) Computer assisted text analysis of stakeholder accommodation and 3) Survey responses from consulted stakeholders about their level of influence. This enables us to provide scholars with a better understanding of the pros and cons of different approaches to map stakeholder influence in government consultations.