The responsiveness of legislative actors to stakeholders’ demands in the European Union

ABSTRACT

This study examines the extent to which stakeholders’ demands are represented by the Commission, European Parliament, and national governments in the Council when legislative proposals are debated. We formulate and test propositions from resource exchange theory to explain variation in the responsiveness of EU actors to various stakeholders. Our research design integrates the study of the formative and decision-making stages of the legislative process, which are often studied in isolation. We combine new information from detailed qualitative content analysis of consultation documents with an established dataset on subsequent legislative decision-making. The findings indicate that a broad range of stakeholders’ demands are reflected in the positions taken by the national and supranational actors involved in the EU's legislative process, but also that there is considerable variation in the extent to which different EU actors respond to stakeholders of different types and origins.

KEYWORDS:

• Consultations
• interest groups
• legislative decision-making
• European Union

Acknowledgements

We thank Adriana Bunea and the three anonymous reviewers for advice and constructive criticisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Andrew Judge is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow.

Robert Thomson is Professor of Politics at Monash University, Melbourne.

ORCID

Andrew Judge http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3604-8271

Robert Thomson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1825-4167

Notes

1. We refer to ‘stakeholders’ because we include all organisations that responded to open consultation calls, regardless of whether they are interest groups.

2. The 12 legislative proposals relating to the selected consultations are the following: air passengers with reduced mobility (COD/2005/007); sugar production (CNS/2005/118); human rights agency (CNS/2005/124); Illegal immigration (COD/2005/167); payment services (COD/2005/245); broadcasting (COD/2005/260); waste processing (COD/2005/281); illegal fishing (CNS/2007/223); market authority (COD/2007/249); car emissions (COD/2007/297); CAP reform (CNS/2008/104); and rural development (EAFRD; CNS/2008/105).

The DEU II dataset contains information on 56 legislative proposals that were passed after the 2014 enlargement, of which we select the 12 that were preceded by consultations for which the documents submitted by stakeholders were available through transparency requests. There were 44 legislative proposals on which there were no records of consultations, or for which we could only obtain summary documents that did not give details of each stakeholder's demands. The 12 selected proposals do not differ markedly from the other 44 proposals in the DEU II dataset with respect to a range of relevant characteristics. Legislative procedure: 7 of the 12 were subject to the ordinary legislative procedure (OLP), while the remaining five were subject to the consultation procedure; by comparison, 30 of the 44 non-selected were subject to OLP. New or amendments to existing legislation: 7 of the selected 12 were new as opposed to amendments, while 27 of the non-selected 44 were new. Instrument type: 4 of the 12 were directives, while 19 of the 44 were directives. The selected 12 did not differ markedly from the non-selected 44 in terms of the average numbers of issues raised during the decision-making stage: an average of 3.0 issues for the selected 12 compared to 2.7 for the non-selected 44.