EU Better Regulation Reforms: Speed vs. Legitimacy in the Post-Draghi Era

Brussels — The European Commission’s plan to overhaul its Better Regulation policy, announced at the end of 2025, is now in its most intensive phase. A call for evidence issued in January 2026 has drawn 288 responses (Source: European Commission call for evidence data), revealing a stark asymmetry in stakeholder participation. Business associations submitted 34.7% of comments, while citizens accounted for just 10.8%. The Commission aims to complete the initial reform process by the second quarter of 2026, driven by Mario Draghi’s 2024 competitiveness report and Enrico Letta’s proposal for a “once-only” consultation model.

The central tension is between the imperative for faster policymaking—to keep pace with the United States and China—and the risk that efficiency gains come at the expense of democratic legitimacy. The data suggest that the reform, as currently structured, could tilt the consultation process decisively toward corporate voices, potentially undermining the very policy quality that Better Regulation was designed to enhance.

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Who Speaks for Europe? The Call for Evidence in Numbers

The 288 submissions to the call for evidence break down as follows:

| Stakeholder category | Share of responses |
|----------------------|-------------------|
| Business associations | 34.7% |
| NGOs | 22.6% |
| Citizens | 10.8% |
| Direct businesses | 7.6% |
| Other (public authorities, academic/research, trade unions, consumer orgs, environmental orgs) | 24.3% |

When direct businesses (7.6%) are added to business associations (34.7%), total business interests account for 42.3% of all submissions (Source: Commission call for evidence breakdown). Citizens, by contrast, represent approximately one-quarter of that share.

Stakeholder support scores for the reform—measured on a scale from -1 (strongly opposed) to 0.8 (strongly supportive)—vary widely across categories (Source: analysis of stakeholder positions). Consumer organisations and companies show the highest positive scores; environmental organisations, public authorities, academic/research institutions, NGOs, and individual citizens cluster at the lower end. Among industry voices, ACT – The App Association was one of the most positive respondents, while DIGITALEUROPE offered more critical commentary.

This pattern confirms a long-standing observation: the Better Regulation consultation framework is disproportionately accessible to organised interests with dedicated advocacy resources. Individual citizens, lacking the time and technical expertise to engage with lengthy policy documents, are structurally underrepresented.

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The Price of Speed: Letta’s “Once-Only” Trap

The Letta report, published in 2024 alongside Draghi’s competitiveness analysis, proposed a “once-only” approach to stakeholder consultations—gathering essential information from each participant a single time rather than soliciting repeated input across multiple policy stages. The rationale is administrative efficiency: reducing the burden on both the Commission and stakeholders, and shortening the overall policymaking cycle.

However, the proposal carries distinct implications for democratic participation. Public and stakeholder consultations are the most known and most appreciated dimension of the Better Regulation policy among European stakeholders (Source: European Commission stakeholder surveys). Streamlining them into a single, compressed engagement could disproportionately affect the least organised groups—citizens and small NGOs—who already submit the fewest comments.

Research from the University of Bergen (Bunea & Nørbech, supported by the European Research Council) demonstrates that the timing and depth of participation matter. Public involvement during the policy legitimation stage—the period when a proposal is being shaped and defended—directly affects the number of amendments introduced by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union (Source: Bunea & Nørbech study on EU policymaking). Early and iterative participation improves how a proposal is received by stakeholders and reduces the number of contested amendments later in the legislative process.

A “once-only” model that compresses consultations into a single window risks losing the iterative feedback loops that allow stakeholders to refine their positions as proposals evolve. The result may be faster initial decisions but more contested laws, with higher amendment rates and longer final adoption times in the Parliament and Council.

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Competitiveness vs. Democracy: A False Trade-off?

Mario Draghi’s 2024 report framed the need for faster policymaking as a competitiveness imperative. The European Commission’s reform narrative echoes this: regulatory agility is necessary to match the speed of legislative cycles in the United States and China. The underlying assumption is that efficiency and participation are in a zero-sum relationship—any gain in one must come at the expense of the other.

The evidence from Bunea & Nørbech suggests otherwise. Their study finds that public participation during early policy formulation improves how a proposal is received by stakeholders. Better-informed and more-inclusive consultations produce proposals that require fewer post-legislative corrections, reducing the overall time from proposal to final adoption. In this framing, participation is not an obstacle to speed but a mechanism for achieving it.

The divergence in business support also undermines the narrative of a unified corporate demand for deregulation. ACT – The App Association, representing small and medium-sized technology firms, was among the most positive voices in favour of the reform. DIGITALEUROPE, which represents larger hardware and software companies, was more critical—not because it opposes efficiency, but because it fears that the “once-only” model may lock out nuanced input that larger firms rely on to shape technical regulations.

If the Commission accelerates consultations but does so in a way that further marginalises citizens and environmental organisations, the resulting regulations may face stronger opposition during the co-decision process. The Parliament and Council could then introduce more amendments, potentially negating any time saved in the consultation phase.

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The Regulatory Rorschach Test

The Better Regulation reform is becoming a test case for how the European Union reconciles three competing objectives: speed, quality, and legitimacy. The current trajectory—shaped by the Draghi and Letta reports—prioritises speed. The data from the January 2026 call for evidence, however, indicate that the stakeholder base itself is divided on whether the benefits of that speed outweigh the risks.

Predictions for the remainder of 2026:

• The Commission will adopt a hybrid consultation model. Rather than a pure “once-only” approach, the final reform is likely to retain a two-stage process—early scoping consultation followed by a targeted technical consultation—to preserve feedback loops while reducing overall duration. This would partially address both business concerns (from DIGITALEUROPE) and legitimacy gaps (from civil society).
• Citizen participation mechanisms will be enhanced digitally, but the overall share of individual citizens in consultations is unlikely to increase beyond 15% in the near term. The structural barriers—time, expertise, language—are not resolved by procedural reforms alone.
• The European Parliament will scrutinise the reform’s impact on its own amendment powers. If the Parliament perceives that compressed consultations reduce its ability to shape legislation, it may push back against the Commission’s timetable, potentially delaying the reform’s final adoption beyond Q2 2026.
• Environmental and public-interest NGOs will continue to mobilise against the reform, using the same consultation channels to argue that the “once-only” model contradicts the Better Regulation principle of “open and transparent policymaking.” Their leverage lies in the empirical link between participation and legislative quality: if contested laws increase post-reform, the Commission will face pressure to reintroduce iterative consultation stages within 18–24 months.

The reform’s long-term success will depend less on its speed and more on whether the Commission can demonstrate that faster policymaking does not come at the cost of predictable, well-received regulation. The first test will be the draft proposal expected in late Q2 2026. If the stakeholder balance in that proposal mirrors the 42.3% business dominance seen in the call for evidence, the legitimacy debate will intensify—not abate.