Instrumenting Interests: Bureaucratic Politics and the European Commission's Consultations with Stakeholders Regime

Consultations with stakeholders have become a well-established policy practice and a key instrument used by the European Commission to increase the quality of its policy proposals, assure compliance with EU legislation and boost its bargaining power in the EU legislative decision-making. Commission officials have considerable discretion to decide the consultation regime employed for drafting proposals and therefore this regime takes different forms and varies in terms of types of consultative fora, time-length of consultative procedures and plurality of organisations included in different consultative settings. The study investigates empirically the factors explaining this variation across policy areas and types of legislative proposals. It elaborates and tests a theoretical framework emphasizing the importance of consultations as an instrument allowing the Commission to act as a policy entrepreneur interested in forging and extending its bureaucratic autonomy and increasing its agenda-setting and legislative bargaining power in the EU decision-making. The empirical analysis is conducted on an original dataset containing detailed information about the consultation regime employed for formulating legislative proposals during 2001-2013.