Mechanisms of Stakeholder Consultation: Explaining Symbolic and Substantive Outcomes in Policymaking

Stakeholder consultation is widely employed as a governance instrument, yet its effects vary substantially across policy domains. While consultation is commonly associated with inclusion, learning, and enhanced legitimacy, existing research provides mixed evidence regarding its substantive influence on policy outputs. This paper develops a mechanism-based explanation for why consultation meaningfully shapes legislation in some contexts while remaining largely symbolic in others, despite identical formal procedures. Building on institutional theory and mechanism-oriented process tracing, the paper argues that variation in consultation outcomes is driven less by procedural design than by pre-consultation dynamics and contextual constraints that structure the effective decision space before formal consultation begins. Four sequential mechanisms are identified: informal pre-consultation, administrative triage, selective uptake of stakeholder input, and implementation authority. Together, these mechanisms explain how stakeholder contributions are pre-structured, filtered, and translated into policy revisions. Empirically, the study applies a most-similar systems design to compare nine Swiss legislative processes across three policy fields: financial market regulation, migration policy, and spatial planning. All cases operate under the same constitutional and procedural framework for consultation, allowing for controlled comparison. The analysis draws on more than thirty semi-structured elite interviews and extensive documentary evidence, combining qualitative content analysis with process tracing to identify mechanism activation. The findings demonstrate distinct and patterned outcomes. In financial market regulation, strong international constraints and centralized enforcement activate early pre-consultation and administrative triage, sharply limiting revision space and producing predominantly symbolic consultation outcomes. In migration policy, high political salience and partisan conflict generate strategic filtering on politically contentious issues, while cantonal implementation authority enables substantive influence on operational aspects, resulting in mixed outcomes. In spatial planning, strong subnational implementation authority, low international constraints, and dense intergovernmental coordination activate all four mechanisms in ways that facilitate extensive deliberation and substantive policy change. The paper makes three contributions. First, it advances consultation research by providing a mechanism-centered explanation that specifies how and when consultation becomes symbolic or substantive. Second, it demonstrates how sector-specific institutional contexts condition mechanism activation within a uniform procedural framework. Third, it links the Swiss experience to broader debates on consultative governance by showing how informal coordination, administrative filtering, and implementation authority systematically shape policy outcomes beyond the formal consultation stage. Overall, the analysis challenges the assumption that stakeholder consultation inherently enhances policy responsiveness. Instead, symbolic and substantive consultation emerge as distinct, patterned outcomes generated by identifiable mechanisms operating largely before formal participation occurs.