Organisation of open public consultations by European Commission

The functioning of the European Union is in principle relying on representative democracy. But due to critics of democratic deficit the EU policymaking is supplemented with participatory democracy and introduction of various opportunity structures for participation of non-state actors such as organisation of public consultations by European Commission. Participation at the consultations offers citizens and other stakeholders access to policymaking fairly early in the policymaking process when solutions to major issues are yet to be determined. Although consultations are open for participation to everyone, including citizens, experts and organised interest groups, the issues consulted are often very technical and complex and demand prior knowledge of the subject. Nevertheless, consultations attract high number of feedbacks. These feedbacks need to be analysed by Commission officials after the consultations are closed and included in original legislative proposal. Whose position were taken into account is predominantly unknown and could result in interest group representation bias. The Commission is by minimum standards of better regulation guidelines only bound to acknowledge feedback by publishing a report on consultations. This poses a research question how Commission officials are able to process all received feedbacks and take them into account when preparing legislative proposal? The public political consultations carried out at the EU level remain the black box of EU policy making. This is particularly problematic, as public policy consultations were introduced precisely with the aim of strengthening participatory democracy, which should contribute to reducing the democratic deficit of the EU and increasing the legitimacy of EU policies. In our analysis we will rely on qualitative interviews conducted with officials from different DGs that have been involved in organisation of open consultations organised between 2017 and 2019 after last better regulation guidelines were introduced. We sampled 63 consultations organised in the mentioned period in different policy areas.