Do consultations matter for stakeholder support for policy proposals? Evidence from the European Union

A key assumption made in the literature on participatory governance and bureaucratic policymaking is that there is a positive relationship between the presence and extent of stakeholder participation and the levels of public legitimacy and support for policies formulated with the help of stakeholder consultations. This relationship is generally assumed and only rarely tested empirically. We address this gap in research and ask: to what extent do consultations matter for levels of stakeholders’ support for policies formulated through stakeholder participation in policymaking? We build on procedural fairness theory and elaborate an argument recognising the importance of policymakers’ public cues sent during the post-decision stage about the fairness of the consultation process during the policy formulation stage, on stakeholders’ consultation fairness perceptions and policy support. We argue that stakeholders are more likely to support policies on which policymakers signal that were formulated following an inclusive, transparent, and attentive to stakeholder demands consultation process. We test our argument on a new dataset containing information about 316 policy proposals formulated by the EC during 2016-2021, in relation to which 8,954 stakeholder comments were received. We find that proposals on which policymakers signal an inclusive consultation as indicated by the presence of at least one open public consultation tend to generate on average significantly higher levels of stakeholder support. Contrary to our expectations, the levels of signalled transparency around consultations are negatively associated with levels of support. We find no systematic association between levels of signalled attentiveness to stakeholder inputs and levels of support. Our findings highlight the challenges of reconciling input and output legitimacy, underscore the limits of using stakeholder involvement as a legitimacy-building strategy, and emphasize the complex relationship between signalled and perceived procedural fairness and the legitimacy of policy processes and outcomes.