Responding or responsiveness? How politicisation influences the European Commission's policy formulation

Does politicisation have an impact on how the European Commission puts forward policy proposals? A large body of research has addressed this question from a responsiveness angle, assessing the degree to which the EU’s policy outputs align with public opinion. We complement this with a procedural approach that assesses how politicisation affects the input, throughput, and output stages of Commission policy formulation. We distinguish between responding – adapting processes to societal pressures – and responsiveness – substantive adjustment of proposals in response to public opinion. Empirically, we combine computational text analysis methods to develop a novel, media-based measurement of politicisation with qualitative, in-depth case analysis of Commission proposals in the realm of agricultural policy (between 2014 and 2024). We analyse three such proposals (with low, moderate, high politicisation respectively) to trace public input across policy-making stages. Our findings indicate that responding and responsiveness vary independently: low politicisation produces narrow responding, moderate politicisation produces broad responding with selective responsiveness, and high politicisation produces narrow responding alongside high responsiveness. Our paper contributes to theory development on how the Commission navigates politicisation by relying on different registers of procedural responding and responsiveness.