Conference Agenda

By allowing important societal interests to provide input on regulatory proposals, stakeholder consultations are supposedly contributing to increase the input legitimacy of the regulatory output of non-majoritarian agencies. As such, stakeholder consultations have become increasingly common, to the extent that they can now be seen as a staple of EU regulatory governance processes. Following these developments, ample scholarly attention has been spent to map and explain stakeholder participation and influence in these processes. Less attention has been paid to the fact that stakeholder consultations might also affect the democratic oversight of regulatory agencies. Following seminal principal-agent arguments of fire alarm oversight, stakeholder consultations could on the one hand alert and activate political principals to take oversight actions. But on the other hand, following more recent arguments related to bureaucratic reputation-building and "procedural politicking", stakeholder consultations may also function to build stakeholder-coalitions that discourage oversight by political principals. We test these two competing theories, together with a novel theoretical argument stating that the effect of stakeholder consultations on democratic oversight is conditional on the sentiment and the polarization of the actual opinions and reactions of concerned stakeholders. We do so with data on stakeholder consultations on 243 regulatory proposals by the three European Financial Supervisory Authorities (EBA, EIOPA, and ESMA) as well as hearings of these agencies in the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affair’s (ECON) monthly scrutiny slots of delegated acts and implemented measures. Our findings indicate that oversight is most frequent when many stakeholders participate in consultations. At first sight, this would seem to support the hypothesis that consultations serve as a fire alarm mechanism for the European Parliament. However, contrary to a fire alarm logic, this effect is stronger when stakeholders are positive about the proposals from the agencies. This indicates that parliamentary hearings focus on relatively successful cases of policymaking and consultation. As such, neither a fire alarm logic nor a logic of procedural politicking seems to adequately reflect the actual influence that EU agencies’ stakeholder consultations have on their democratic oversight. We theorize that our results could be explained by Members of the European Parliament (and portfolio rapporteurs in particular) aiming to enhance their standing by attaching themselves to popular policies. This pattern may be amplified by agencies themselves actively pushing to showcase their most popular proposals to MEPs. As such, this proposed explanation speaks to how reputational incentives of stakeholders, regulators and legislators shape oversight dynamics in interaction with each other.

While the European Union has made the rule of law a foundational value, a persistent gap remains between formal assessment frameworks and the tangible implementation of reforms in Member States. Despite their structured methodology, annual Rule of Law Reports often paint a softened picture of institutional performance, underestimating the complex political and administrative obstacles to transformative reform. This risks cultivating a sense of normative complacency at both EU and national levels.

This paper argues that the rule of law must move beyond a monitoring agenda and become a deeply embedded feature of public governance. It approaches the issue through a conceptual-empirical lens, combining normative inquiry with critical analysis of existing data and instruments. Specifically, it draws from Rule of Law Reports (2020–2024), the EU Justice Scoreboard, European Semester recommendations, national Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRPs), and implementation data from the Technical Support Instrument (TSI, formerly SRSP).

Three core questions guide the analysis:

Why does the implementation of rule of law reforms remain inconsistent across Member States?

What role can political and institutional leadership play in overcoming this stagnation?

How can rule of law principles be operationalised in the everyday practices of national public administrations?

The paper claims that rule of law sustainability depends less on the existence of legal frameworks and more on their translation into administrative standards, procedures, and leadership cultures. Empirically, it shows how many reforms praised on paper (e.g., judicial councils, integrity plans, digitalisation) often fail to produce structural change due to lack of ownership, short political cycles, or weak public sector capacity.

To address this, the paper proposes:

stronger linkages between EU rule of law instruments and administrative reform agendas,

a revised EU reform conditionality that incorporates performance-based implementation tracking,

investment in integrity-driven leadership development within Member States' public sectors.

Finally, the paper urges the EU to assume a more strategic facilitation role — less focused on compliance metrics, and more engaged in building long-term administrative cultures that internalise rule of law principles from within.

Public trust in government institutions has been severely eroded across Europe, prompting widespread reforms to restore confidence and strengthen democratic legitimacy. This decline has been uneven across European states, with citizens perceiving stark differences in administrative impartiality, levels of corruption, and the quality of public service delivery. Although scholars increasingly emphasized the centrality of institutional trust for the stability of democratic governance and civic engagement, the mechanisms linking the quality of government to trust remain insufficiently theorized and empirically tested in the European context. This study addresses this gap by examining how the quality of government shapes institutional trust and its components. Drawing on the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute framework, it conceptualizes the quality of government through impartiality, corruption, and the quality of public service. It explores institutional trust across political trust, inter-organizational trust, and trust in Public Administration (PA). It further investigates how institutional trust relates to democracy and civil rights, wealth redistribution and social well-being, European identity, political interest, active and electoral participation, and happiness and well-being, operationalized through seven constructs. Using large-scale datasets, including the European Quality of Government Index (EQI) and the European Values Study (EVS), and applying Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the research provides new insights into how governance performance underpins citizens’ trust in institutions. Results show that political interest and happiness/well-being strongly influence institutional trust. The findings confirm a positive relationship between the quality of government and institutional trust: countries with higher EQI scores tend to exhibit greater public trust in government institutions. Moreover, trust in PA is closely tied to perceived corruption, particularly in highly scrutinized sectors such as education, law enforcement, public services, social security, and the judiciary. Trust in international institutions like the EU and the United Nations surpasses that in national political bodies, suggesting a stabilizing effect. To rebuild trust, European governments must enhance transparency, service quality, and civic engagement.