Abstract
EU consumer policy is a policy area that is receiving increased attention and is considered important for the proper functioning of the internal market. Yet, as with many other supranational policy areas, conflicting positions of the Member States have led to many compromises and rejections of EU-initiated proposals. By building on regime theory and previous research identifying consumer policy regimes, the aim with this article is to investigate potential patterns in countries’ preferences in EU consumer policy. With this, the article seeks both to contribute to the theoretical understanding of factors influencing Member States’ positions to EU consumer policy and to the debate on how future EU consumer policies should be designed and put into power. Differences in country and regime preferences are analysed using data collected through an open public consultation as part of the European Commission’s Fitness Check of European consumer and marketing law in 2016 and through interviews with key stakeholders in 2018. The results show that there are substantial differences between the regimes and that the level of harmonization of consumer and marketing law seems to be the most contested issue. Furthermore, the article points to several potential reasons for these differences between countries and regimes and recommends that future studies should be undertaken to generate deeper knowledge about the effects of these explanatory factors.
Highlights
European Union (EU) consumer policy is a policy area that is receiving increased attention and is considered important for the proper functioning of the internal market
Differences between countries and groups of countries can be investigated in several ways. Both Repo and Timonen (2017) and Nessel (2019) have used p values from tests for equality of means. This approach is of limited value when investigating the data from the open public consultation, both because of the limited amount of unique replies and more importantly because the p value is an indicator of the probability that the difference between the population means is at least as large as what has been observed in the sample
A topic that has been key to EU consumer policy since it was first established, and which still represents one of the key challenges for achieving common agreement between the Member States, is the level of harmonization of European consumer policy
Summary
EU consumer policy is a policy area that is receiving increased attention and is considered important for the proper functioning of the internal market. Differences in country and regime preferences are analysed using data collected through an open public consultation as part of the European Commission’s Fitness Check of European consumer and marketing law in 2016 and through interviews with key stakeholders in 2018.
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