Completing the ERC Starting Grant project CONSULTATIONEFFECTS

Bureaucracies routinely invite citizens and organised interests to weigh in on public policy. But does this participation actually matter? The ERC Starting Grant project CONSULTATIONEFFECTS, led by Professor Adriana Bunea at the Department of Comparative Politics, set out to answer this question. Drawing on several original datasets covering thousands of public participation events, the project provides a comprehensive account of whether, when, and how public participation shapes the inputs, processes, outputs, and outcomes of bureaucratic policymaking. The project consisted of three research streams.

Policy inputs

The first research stream examined policy inputs. Analysing 1,258 EU-level policy events, a study published in Regulation & Governance demonstrates that key features of the policy acts inviting public comments shape both the frequency and the diversity of stakeholder participation in supranational policymaking. Another study by project team member Idunn Nørbech, published in European Union Politics, analyses 1,663 European Commission consultations to show that policy context shapes citizen engagement: citizens participate in far greater numbers at early, pre-formulation stages of policymaking and when policy documents avoid technically complex language. A third study published in Governance determines that how bureaucracies craft their policy acts shapes the information quality of the comments they receive: informationally dense and syntactically complex acts generate comments of higher information quality. At the national level, a study published in the European Journal of Political Research draws on 4,062 Norwegian public consultations to establish that more government invitations to consultations systematically translate into higher stakeholder participation, greater diversity of represented interests, and a higher likelihood of — and more frequent — citizen participation.

Policy processes

The second stream examined policy processes. A study published in the Journal of European Public Policy shows that consultations significantly strengthen the European Commission's institutional power and leverage in negotiating interinstitutional agreements with the European Parliament and the Council. A second study, also published in the Journal of European Public Policy, shows that public participation helps the Commission preserve its reputation as a responsible policymaker and increases the likelihood that it responds to evidence-based policy inputs. A third study, published in the Journal of European Integration, examines how far participatory and evidence-based policymaking can be reconciled in designing and implementing Better Regulation frameworks.

Policy outputs

The third stream examined policy outputs and outcomes. A study published in the Policy Studies Journal shows that participatory processes featuring robust representation of a stakeholder's interests at the agenda-setting stage, and relying on more open-format participation venues, systematically generate higher stakeholder support. A study published in the Journal of European Public Policy shows that this support carries real legislative weight: stakeholder backing for the Commission's draft legislative proposals reduces the probability of legislative amendments to those proposals — an effect that grows stronger when support comes from a diverse set of stakeholders.

Research outputs

The project's findings are published in 13 research articles and 3 book chapters, and have reached broader audiences through 3 blog posts hosted by the LSE's European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) blog and the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. The project team presented its research at over 30 conferences, workshops, and public events — three of them hosted by the European Commission and the EU Committee of the Regions, reaching supranational and national policymakers and practitioners directly. The project also supported the organisation of an international workshop on 'Stakeholder participation in bureaucratic politics and policymaking', co-chaired by the PI at the 2023 ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops. The original datasets generated by the project further supported the completion of one PhD thesis and two MA theses in the Department of Comparative Politics.

The project's quality was recognised throughout its implementation. The PI was awarded the UiB’s 2019 Meltzer Award for Young Researchers and a Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the European University Institute (2022). Idunn Nørbech, who completed her PhD as part of the project, won the 2022 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Interest Groups best paper award — junior prize. CONSULTATIONEFFECTS also generated lasting research collaborations with scholars based at Central European University, the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, the University of Amsterdam, Brown University, and George Washington University. Building on — and extending — the expertise developed through the project, the PI is currently completing a journal special issue on 'Making Bureaucracy Public: Democratic Policymaking in Bureaucratic Realms', co-edited with Dovilė Rimkutė (University of Amsterdam) and Susan Moffitt (Brown University) and forthcoming in Governance.