Aligning Access and Affectedness in Participatory Governance: Civil Society Organisations in Finnish Preparatory Bodies

ABSTRACT This article examines whether CSO access to preparatory bodies reflects the logic of participatory governance, according to which those affected by policies should have opportunities engage in their making. Existing research provides limited tools to assess this in a policy‐relevant manner. We propose an exploratory, policy‐specific benchmark based on regulatory impact assessments (RIAs) of policies linked to preparatory bodies. We examine whether access by CSOs aligns with expected affectedness among their constituencies. We test this approach by analysing CSO access to Finnish preparatory bodies over a 3‐year period. We focus on two pairings, citizens and citizen groups, and companies and business groups, and examine preparatory bodies that include at least one such interest organisation ( N = 103). Overall, access patterns align with affectedness. However, this alignment is stronger for business groups than for citizen groups and varies across policy areas for the latter. By introducing a policy‐specific benchmark for evaluating access, this article demonstrates that even when accounting affectedness, inequalities in access persist, resulting in a participatory gap in the involvement of citizen groups.