EU agencies’ stakeholder bodies: vehicles of enhanced control, legitimacy or bias?

Abstract

EU agencies are increasingly subject to a flurry of stakeholder bodies. Despite their prevalence, and the considerable variation in structures formally professed to serve the same purpose, we know little about the actor preferences driving the set-up of such structures or the potential implications of specific institutional design choices. We systematically map structural variations across EU agencies and analyse to what extent the establishment and the design of stakeholder bodies is principal-imposed or agency-initiated. Do stakeholder structures enhance political control serving to broadly legitimise agencies, or to the contrary, do they reflect preferences of the bureaucratic actors they are meant to control, and with what implications? We find that, for the most part, weak principal control and steering leaves it to the agencies themselves to design stakeholder bodies as they see fit. This has the potential to introduce unsanctioned biases in favour of specific groups, potentially depleting rather than bolstering legitimacy. A major implication of EU agencies’ stakeholder engagement is that the agency model is currently in flux, moving away from the classic insulated agency towards greater politicization in regulatory policy.