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

Stakeholder consultation has become a widely used governance instrument, yet its effects vary markedly across policy domains. While commonly associated with inclusion, learning, and legitimacy, existing research provides mixed evidence regarding its substantive influence on policy outputs and largely focuses on identifying contextual correlates rather than explaining how influence is produced. This paper develops a mechanism-based explanation for when consultation meaningfully shapes legislation and when it remains largely symbolic. Building on a most-similar systems design, the study compares nine legislative processes in financial market regulation, migration policy, and spatial planning. Drawing on more than thirty elite interviews and extensive document material, the analysis shows that consultation outcomes depend less on formal procedural openness than on four causal processes: informal pre-consultation, administrative triage, selective uptake, and implementation authority. Consultation becomes symbolic where articulated input fails to alter legislative content, while substantive and hybrid outcomes emerge where stakeholder claims change particular instruments, implementation arrangements, or the architecture of a project. The paper advances research on governance by specifying the mechanisms through which consultation becomes causally effective or ineffective and by demonstrating how sector-specific institutional contexts condition their activation.