Does public participation in supranational policymaking enhance the European Commission’s legislative agenda-setting success?

Under what conditions does public participation in supranational policymaking help the European Commission strengthen its legislative agenda-setting power and minimise the change of legislative proposals by European legislators? We answer by explaining how public participation shapes the EC’s agenda-setting power through strengthening (weakening) the input, output, and process legitimacy of legislative proposals. We argue that key features of public participation, such as the extent and diversity of participation, the expressed levels of stakeholder support, and the overall openness of the public consultation regime, are markers of the input, output, and process legitimacy of EC policymaking and legislative proposals. We test our argument on an original dataset, exploring the link between public participation and agenda-setting success measured as text similarity between proposed and adopted legislative acts. We find that stakeholder support during policy legitimation increases the probability of agenda-setting success. This is strengthened when legislative proposals are positively evaluated by more diverse actors, which increases proposals’ output legitimacy. Features of public participation during the policy formulation stage do not covary systematically with levels of text similarity between proposed and adopted text. We find no systematic association between the openness of the consultation regime and the scope of legislative change.