Understanding patterns of public commenting on bureaucratic policymaking: Evidence from the European Union

Stakeholder engagement in the design and formulation of public policies is a landmark of modern policymaking in advanced democracies. For bureaucratic, non-elected institutions, stakeholders’ participation in policymaking constitutes a valuable source of information and legitimacy and an opportunity to address key issues of interest representation in public policymaking such as bias, inclusiveness, and (un)equal access to and influence over decision-makers and decision-making processes of affected stakeholders. We examine a new form of stakeholder engagement introduced by the European Commission as part of its 2016 Better Regulation reform: the ‘stakeholder feedback mechanism’, which invited citizens and interest organizations to submit public comments and ‘express general views on a specific document’ across different stages of supranational policymaking. This new mechanism presents a set of distinctive features relative to the classic public consultations: enhanced transparency over stakeholder identity and comments, minimum EC agenda-setting and expansion of public participation across policy stages. These features raise important questions about the patterns of stakeholder engagement and public commenting on supranational bureaucratic policymaking: what are the patterns of stakeholder engagement in this new feedback mechanism that is akin to an online public hearing? And, relatedly, what explains the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation in this institutionalized mechanism for giving public comments on supranational bureaucratic policymaking? We answer by examining a new dataset allowing the study of participation and diversity of stakeholders providing written feedback on all 1258 policy acts (feedback events) inviting public comments by the Juncker Commission between June 2016 and November 2019, across all policy areas and policy stages. We examine 15,824 public comments provided by 7,521 organisations and 3,946 citizens. Theoretically, we build on the literatures on regulatory governance and stakeholder engagement in bureaucratic policymaking to explain the observed variation in the levels and diversity of stakeholder participation in this public commenting mechanism. We identify two competing explanations: one emphasizes the importance of institutional constraints and of policy act type characteristics, while the other highlights the importance of policy domain characteristics. Our findings show that acts corresponding to early policy stages and those allowing a more clear identification of how stakeholder feedback is taken into account and feeds into the policy process (i.e., roadmaps on new policy initiatives, inception impact assessments and delegated acts) are significantly more likely to witness higher levels of participation than those corresponding to later policy stages and offering more ambiguous and less impactful ways for stakeholders’ inputs to feed into decision-making (i.e., draft legislative proposals and implementing acts). Furthermore, in line with the expectations, policy acts covering issues in regulatory and distributive policy domains attract higher levels of stakeholder public comments relative to foreign and interior policies. The findings show however there is important variation in the ways policy act type characteristics and policy domain characteristics affect the diversity of stakeholder participation depending on the measures we use to assess it (i.e., based on the diversity of functional interests represented or the diversity of country-level/national interests represented by stakeholders).