Does Citizens’ Participation in Supranational Policymaking Enhance the Output Legitimacy of the European Commission’s Legislative Proposals?

When and how does citizen participation in EU supranational policymaking enhance the output legitimacy of the European Commission’s legislative proposals? We answer by elaborating an argument about the importance of key features of public participation. Specifically, we argue that the relative strength of citizens’ representation during the agenda-setting stage, their levels of expressed support for EC initiatives at the roadmap stage, and the type of argument citizens use to substantiate their expressed support (or lack thereof) for EC initiatives, are key predictors of the levels of stakeholder support expressed via public comments on EC proposals. We test our argument on a new dataset comprising 531 EC legislative proposals drafted and submitted for public comment between 2017-2023, which generated 55,896 evaluative comments from citizens and organizational stakeholders. Methodologically, we innovate by adopting a text-as-data approach to measure the levels of citizen support for EC proposals by employing a semi-supervised machine learning technique, namely Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS). We test our argument using multi-level regression analysis. Our study contributes to key debates in the literatures on bureaucratic legitimacy, agenda-setting, and participatory governance. Our preliminary findings reveal limited support for our theoretical expectations. While citizen presence in online public consultations is positively associated with policy support, the relative numerical strength of citizen representation shows no significant effect. Contrary to expectations, business presence at the consultation stage correlates positively with citizen support. However, we find that the quality of participation matters: when citizens provide more evidence-based comments during policy formulation, their subsequent support for legislative proposals is significantly higher. This suggests that meaningful participation, characterized by the nature and quality of policy inputs rather than mere presence, may be more important for generating legitimacy in technocratic policymaking contexts.