By Adriana Bunea, Idunn Nørbech.
Abstract:We examine whether and how public participation in policymaking contributes towards fostering stakeholder support for policy proposals formulated in the bureaucratic arena. We explain how key markers of procedural fairness describing both the participation process and policymakers’ presentations of it during the decision justification stage co-vary systematically with (higher) levels of stakeholder support. We test our argument on an original dataset with 8,902 stakeholder evaluative statements on 315 policy proposals formulated by the European Commission during 2017-2021. 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 are systematically and positively associated with higher stakeholder support. Enhanced information provision and transparency about the public participation process on behalf of policymakers during decision justification increases stakeholder support, but the co-variation is statistically significant only when accounting for policy area type. We find no systematic co-variation between how much attention policymakers pay to discuss the policy inputs coming from participatory processes as part of their decision justification and levels of stakeholder support for policy proposals. Our study contributes to key debates in the research on participatory governance, bureaucratic policymaking, and procedural fairness.
Published:
2025
Online available:
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