Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CONSULTATIONEFFECTS (Effects of stakeholder consultations on inputs, processes and outcomes of executive policymaking)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-10-01 bis 2025-06-30
Public participation procedures are frequently used by bureaucracies to involve citizens and organizations in public policymaking across countries and levels of government. CONSULTATIONEFFECTS examined whether, when, and how public participation impacts the policy inputs, processes, outputs, and outcomes of bureaucratic policymaking. The research work was organised into three streams. The first focused on the policy inputs (e.g. public comments, stakeholder feedback) entering policymaking through consultations. Using data from 1258 policy events organized in the EU, one study found that key features of policy acts subject to public comment shape the frequency and diversity of stakeholder participation in supranational policymaking. Another study found that the crafting of bureaucratic policy acts determines the information quality of public comments: informationally dense and syntactically complex acts generate comments of higher information quality. Another study, using data from 4062 Norwegian public consultations, found that a higher number of government invitations to consultations systematically correlates with higher stakeholder participation, higher diversity of interests represented, and a higher likelihood of and more frequent citizen participation. A second research stream focused on policy processes. One study showed that consultations can significantly boost the European Commission’s institutional power and leverage in negotiating interinstitutional agreements with the European Parliament and the Council. Another study showed that public participation helps the Commission preserve its reputation as a responsible policymaker and increase the likelihood that it will respond to evidence-based policy inputs. A third study examined the extent to which participatory and evidence-based policymaking can be reconciled in the design and implementation of Better Regulation frameworks. The third research stream focused on policy outputs and outcomes. One study found that participatory processes characterized by a robust representation of a stakeholder’s interests during the agenda-setting stage and consisting of more open-format participation venues systematically correlate with higher stakeholder support. Another study found that stakeholder support for the Commission’s draft legislative proposals reduces the probability of legislative amendments to those proposals. The relationship is stronger when support comes from a diverse set of stakeholders.
The project engaged in innovative concept- and theory-building and conducted empirical analyses on novel, built-for-purpose datasets. The project's research findings were disseminated as part of 15 research articles published in internationally recognised, peer-reviewed journals of political science, 3 book chapters (two in Oxford University Press handbooks), 2 blogposts on the LSE European Politics and Policymaking website, and 1 blogpost on the Regulatory Studies Centre at George Washington University. These research outputs were based on several novel, built-for-purpose datasets that support the empirical work presented. The research articles have been presented at 34 conferences, workshops, and other public dissemination events. Four of these events were organized in Brussels by the European Commission, the Committee of Regions, and the University of Bergen and had policymakers and policy practitioners as the main audience.
The project engaged in innovative and beyond the state of the art research in several ways. For example, the article “Does public participation foster stakeholder support for policy proposals? Evidence from the European Union.” (Policy Studies Journal) contributes significantly to the understanding of how the procedural fairness of policy formulation and consultation processes impacts the levels of stakeholder support for policy proposals. Unlike most existing research, which employs experimental survey designs, this article uses observational policy data. The study also introduces a new text-as-data approach to measure stakeholder support. The article “Do government invitations to consultations shape stakeholder participation in public policymaking?” (European Journal of Political Research) contributes significantly to understanding how key yet under-researched institutional aspects of consultation design (the number of invitations to consultations) shape the extent and diversity of stakeholder participation in policymaking. This study constitutes the first systematic attempt in the literature to do this. The study employs a unique dataset providing information about all online public consultations organized by the Norwegian government between 2009-2023, across all ministries and policy areas. The article “Responsive to What? Explaining the Information Quality of Public Comments on Bureaucratic Policymaking Using a Text-as-Data Approach” (Governance) contributes to existing research by: (1) advancing a multi-dimensional conceptual framework and measurement strategy for comment information quality that moves beyond prior qualitative case studies or narrow content coding schemes and employs a text-as-data approach, (2) developing a theoretical framework emphasizing the role of institutional factors in a research fields that has focused mainly on stakeholder-level features, (3) conducting one of the first large-N, systematic studies explaining the information quality of EU public comments, extending thus an empirical literature that has focused disproportionately on the U.S. and (4) finding evidence showing that stakeholders adjust their contributions to institutional contexts and thus showing that public commenting has the potential to inform evidence-based policymaking meaningfully.