Policy-Makers, Stakeholders and Legitimacy - Exploring the role of political salience in EU policy-makers' interactions with stakeholders

Abstract: This thesis utilises an exploratory approach to analyse the system of interactions between the policy-makers of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Energy and different types of stakeholders. This system of interactions is often referred to as the ‘interest system of the EU’ and is largely informed by rational choice theoretical assumptions about the behaviours of policy-makers and stakeholders. The literature centres around the questions: which stakeholders do policy-makers interact with and why? Particularly business stakeholders are seen as privileged in their interactions with policy-makers, causing a ‘bias’ in the system. However, the academic field remains limited in its understanding of the role of policy-makers in the interest system. By utilising the concepts of input legitimacy and political salience, this paper seeks to fill a number of literary gaps and explore the behaviour of policy-makers in regulating which stakeholders they interact with. An exploratory approach is utilised to investigate the role of input legitimacy in policy-makers’ interactions with specific stakeholders. The results indicate that businesses are indeed dominant, but that this dominance significantly varies when one distinguishes between salient and non-salient cases, thereby testing the role of input legitimacy. This indicates that input legitimacy does impact the behaviour of policy-makers and it provides a foundation for future research on the roles of policy-makers in regulating the EU’s interactions with stakeholders.