EU financial market regulation and stakeholder consultations

Abstract

The shock of the international financial crisis trigged new policies for the regulation of the financial markets in the European Union. A variety of stakeholders were consulted on how the financial markets ought to be regulated in order to restore confidence in the European Union and to boost consumer protection. We analyze the three directive proposals on Alternative Investment Fund Managers, Deposit Guarantee Schemes and Investor Compensation Schemes as case studies to study the agenda setting processes, research the actor populations, and identify the policy frames of these actors. We do so by scrutinizing the EU level and national level consultations and by using a content analysis of official documents of the political institutions as well as of the media coverage and the individual stakeholders’ position papers. The findings indicate that the frames of EU level actors and national level actors are quite homogeneous and that national actors employ a variety of different strategies to voice their interests in EU financial regulation.