The European Commission employs one of the most institutionalized and ambitious stakeholder engagement regimes. Designed as a tool for information gathering and preference aggregation, the EC’s stakeholder consultation regime constitutes an important part of its agenda-setting and policy formulation activities. It provides the Commission with an important informational advantage over its political masters, by allowing it to tap into policy and politically relevant information coming from stakeholders from across all Member States. Despite its frequent and intensive use, there is little systematic research about the extent to which stakeholder engagement helps the Commission improve the quality of its legislative anticipation, i.e., its ability to formulate policies that are minimally amended or changed by the EU co-legislators. Our study addresses this puzzle and elaborates a theoretical argument emphasizing the importance of two key mechanisms through which stakeholder engagement improves legislative anticipation: features of consultation design and patterns of stakeholder participation. We test our argument on a novel dataset containing information about 385 legislative proposals formulated and adopted between 2016-2021. Preliminary findings show that patterns of participation mater more than features of consultation design. The number of stakeholders engaged across all consultation activities is a strong predictor of the quality of legislative anticipation. Stakeholder diversity improves the quality legislative anticipation but only when the levels of stakeholder support for the proposal are high. The number of consultation activities improves the quality of legislative anticipation but only when considering the number of stakeholders participating at different policy formulation and consultation stages.