Responsiveness and Interest Representation in EU Multilevel Governance

Responsiveness within the European Union’s legislative process remains difficult to assess, particularly when decision-makers must navigate divergent stakeholder preferences and competing institutional incentives. This study examines how variation in stakeholder opinions shapes the positions adopted by EU decision-makers and, in turn, influences the legislative process. Drawing on theories of resource exchange and interest mobilization, we develop expectations about when and how stakeholder heterogeneity affects the alignment between stakeholder preferences and decision-maker positions. The analysis combines the DEU-III dataset with data from policy statements and public consultation submissions to evaluate responsiveness across the Commission, Council, and Parliament. The findings show that heterogeneous stakeholder preferences are systematically associated with differences in decision-maker positions, indicating that interest-group diversity structures patterns of responsiveness within EU lawmaking. Moreover, the results reveal institutional variation that the Commission and Council tend to align more closely with stakeholder preferences than the European Parliament when internal disagreement is high. These findings advance research on democratic responsiveness by demonstrating that, in multilevel governance systems, responsiveness is shaped not only by stakeholder participation but by the distribution of their preferences and the institutional context in which they are processed.