This article asks to what extent the European Commission’s use of consultation depends on policy characteristics of the proposal being formulated. It examines all consultations organized during a formulation process and looks at the number of open consultations (online consultations) as well as the number of repeat consultations (expert groups, policy fora) by the total number of consultations. Three types of use of consultation are conceptualized. A multinomial logistic regression is performed on a cross-sectional sample of 150 policy proposals adopted between 2010 and 2014. Data are triangulated from official documents. The empirical analysis indicates that the Commission’s use of consultation depends on the complexity, newness, and salience of a proposal. These findings are also discussed in view of the 2015 reform of Better Regulation.

This paper answers the following question: Do the uncertainty and salience of issues determine whether the European Commission will use an expert group to assist with policy formulation? Using rationalist theory, three hypotheses test whether transversality, the importance of standard-setting and the salience of a policy proposal determine whether a Commission DG will ask an expert group to assist in preparing that same proposal. Data was retrieved from official documents via EUR-Lex. A binary logistic regression analysis has been conducted on a sample of 260 proposals that were drafted by DG Climate Action, DG Communications Networks, Content & Technology, DG Environment and DG Internal Market and Services. All proposals were adopted between 2010 and 2013. The empirical analysis shows that expert group involvement in policy formulation is neither negligible nor ubiquitous in terms of frequency as expert groups assisted in preparing 33.5% of the proposals. DGs were significantly more likely to consult an expert group when the proposal under preparation was more transversal in nature and/or when that proposal treated standard-setting more pronouncedly. In contrast, the salience of a proposal was shown to be insignificantly related to the presence of an expert group during policy formulation.

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