Between a rock and a hard place

Ondertitel:stakeholder involvement as a legitimation strategy in European Union Agencies

The European Union and its regulatory agencies are stuck between a rock and a hard place when involving societal stakeholders. On the one hand, agencies are expected to involve stakeholders to avoid allegations of being technocratic and distant policymaking. On the other hand, however, opening the door for stakeholders induces the risk for agency capture. Yet, it remains unknown whether stakeholder involvement as an institutional instrument indeed contributes to the agencies’ legitimacy. Therefore, the central research question of this dissertation is ‘To what extent does stakeholder involvement foster or inhibit balanced interest representation in EU regulatory agencies?’ This dissertation’s answer is based on two pillars. First, a theoretical pillar challenges the link built between stakeholder involvement, democracy and legitimacy. It argues that legitimacy is a social relationship and thus cannot be evaluated by simply comparing the EU’s institutional design to a democratic ideal. It reconceptualises legitimacy as a social relation and argues that stakeholder involvement is a mere legitimation strategy. To evaluate a legitimation strategy, scholars should assess whether the EU’s claims to be more democratic do in fact translate into improved policies or institutional designs. The second pillar, consisting of four empirical chapters, does exactly so, and focuses on the formal consultation instruments of the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs): three regulatory agencies operating in the policy field of financial regulation. Each of the empirical chapters assesses the participation of stakeholders in formal consultation procedures, i.e. public consultations and advisory councils. To this end, it collected all stakeholders’ responses to public consultations organised by the ESAs from 2004-2014. Moreover, to analyse the advisory councils, qualitative interviews were conducted with the members of these councils. Based on these data, this dissertation shows that both the public consultations and the advisory councils are dominated by business interests. Participation in the public consultations remains largely stable over time, and although new stakeholders enter the arena, they remain peripheral actors. Also in the advisory councils, non-business interests such as consumer groups face difficulties in contributing to the meetings, allowing business interests to influence the councils. These findings place a critical note to the idea that stakeholder involvement would automatically foster legitimate policymaking. Instead, stakeholder involvement is a legitimation strategy which the EU uses to legitimate their policymaking efforts. Investigating stakeholder involvement in three agencies, this dissertation shows that involving stakeholders might do more harm than good. The results show that it does not overcome, and sometimes even induces, biased interest representation. This implies that stakeholder involvement as an instrument to improve agencies’ legitimacy is flawed and should be considered with care.

Jaar van publicatie:2021

Trefwoorden:Doctoral thesis

Toegankelijkheid:Open