Consumer Institutions in Europe: how significant are their variations?

Defining and expanding a joint consumer protection policy has been a very relevant goal for the European Union since the 1970s. However, positions among member states as to consumer policy development have not always been convergent which has led to a coexistence of different perspectives and approaches among EU member states. While some countries are in favor of increasing the harmonization of consumer policy, many others are hesitant about a greater convergence in this policy area given their policy preferences. In this paper, our aim is to assess major institutional differences among consumer authorities in European countries, based on careful scrutiny of their formal characteristics. Specifically, we seek to answer several questions: first, to what extent member states have developed institutions where citizens have their rights as consumers protected; second, what formal characteristics these institutions exhibit and how they can be clustered around models and finally, to what extent such characteristics impact citizens’ trust in the consumer protection regime. We build our findings on two datasets, an original dataset, based on legal sources defining the formal design and operational procedures of consumer authorities, and present synthetic dimensions regarding the most relevant features of each institution. The second dataset is based on the European Commission’s Consumer Conditions Scoreboard, which presents survey data from a total of 28037 respondents (European Commission 2019).