ABSTRACT
This chapter asks the question: when and why are stakeholders granted privileged access to European Commission policy meetings? It focuses on the more closed phases of the consultations, providing and testing hypotheses about interest groups (private individuals are almost always excluded) that are successful in gaining privileged access to the exclusive policy meetings, with an eye to the possibility that different groups could be successful before and after the open consultations. In an attempt to hone in on qualitatively privileged access, the chapter focuses on access to those exclusive policy discussion meetings which are highlighted in the European Commission’s impact assessments. The European Commission has wide discretion when consulting with stakeholders and can independently and without oversight grant access or for that matter exclude any interest group from its policy discussion meetings. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of those results, both in terms of democratic legitimacy and interest group strategies.
