EU Think Tank Fora as Transaction Cost Reducers: A Study of Informal Interest Intermediation in the EU
Main
Abstract
By examining the organisational structure of EU think tank fora (seminars, workshops and conferences), this article proposes that fora can play the role of transaction cost reducers in EU policymaking. I argue that certain aspects of EU policymaking, including i) controlled processes of consultation, ii) diminishing costs of management, and iii) the risk of state capture, incentivise EU institutions to outsource part of the consultation activity to policy actors that can help EU institutions fulfil their informational and legitimacy needs. I argue that think tanks are able to play this role because they i) reduce information asymmetries by connecting a wide variety of policy actors and ii) act as intermediaries that mitigate opportunistic behaviour. The empirical assessment reveals that the dimensions characterising transactions are present in EU think tank fora. It shows that policy actors that do not usually participate in formal consultation processes frequently attend fora where they meet representatives of EU institutions, particularly Parliament and Commission representatives.
Details
Article Keywords
European Union, Think tanks, Interest intermediation, Transaction costs
Issue
Section
Research Articles
Article Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.- Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
- Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
- Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.