Bandwagons and Quiet Corners in Regulatory Governance

Abstract

Stakeholder engagement is often considered an essential component of regulatory policymaking and governance. Our main aim in this paper is to explain variation in stakeholder engagement across regulatory trajectories. More specifically we aim to assess why some regulatory policymaking processes attract a larger and more diverse set of stakeholders, while others attract much smaller and more homogenous regulatory crowds. We build on a newly established dataset of primary data regarding stakeholder engagement in EU regulatory governance to test our assumptions. We find that both the salience and the number of different consultation instruments affect the density and diversity of stakeholder engagement, whereas the complexity of regulations seems to mainly affect the density of stakeholder engagement. The combination of both institutional and regulation-specific drivers of stakeholder engagement in regulatory governance yields relevant implications for the study of responsive regulation and the role stakeholders can fulfill in regulatory decision-making.