Interest Group Organisation in the European Union

How Internal Organisational Structures Shape Interest Group Agency

Michelle Hollman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815372349
• eBook ISBN: 9781351245647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The investigation of the internal workings of interest groups opens the view on the behavioural dynamics within these organisations. By analysing their intraorganisational structures, this book explains how groups prepare to become active in the European Union and why we observe contact, conflict and cooperation of interest groups and other political actors in the European arena.

The book presents four causal mechanisms which explain, on the one hand, why interest groups engage with contacts across a diverse set of political actors and, on the other hand, why some interest organisations are more actionable at the European level than others. It furthermore elaborates a typology of interest groups along intraorganisational criteria. The analysis of twelve differing case studies provides a rich empirical ground to explain how and why certain intraorganisational processes unfold within interest groups. It thereby sheds light on the behavioural organisational patterns which drive interest group agency in European multi-level politics.

This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of interest groups, lobbying, European Union politics and more broadly to public policy/administration and comparative politics.

1 An introduction to the private life of groups

Why look inside interest groups?

‘Preparation is key’: this statement holds true for most situations, actors and activities, including the engagement in lobbying activities of interest groups. Before interest organisations become actively involved in the policy-making process, they need to internally build lobbying capacities (Halpin 2014; Halpin et al. 2011). These preparatory steps can for instance include the definition of a lobbying position with groups’ respective members, the coordination between different departments and the distribution of tasks between the latter, the allocation of time and financial resources for given lobbying activities and an approval to finally take action by the respective boards or commissions within the organisation. The preparation phase of lobbying and political advocacy has, however, been largely neglected as a phenomenon. The academic literature dealing with advocacy activities heavily focuses on when and how interest groups lobby political institutions. However, we know very little about the ways in which groups prepare to engage in such lobbying activities (Halpin and Fraussen 2017) and therefore cannot explain the underlying logics of how interest groups, such as consumer protection organisations, trade unions and business associations, set-up their internal capacities to defend the interests of their members. These groups do not simply and only lobby, out of the blue. Instead, they must develop in-house (or buy external) lobbying capacity before they can actually engage in lobbying in the policy-making process. The question how they achieve this, which organisational mechanisms are at work and which impact this has on their policy work, has not been studied (but see the work of Halpin 2014; Halpin et al. 2011). This book will use this observation as its starting point to show how interest groups prepare ‘in private’ and build internal capacities for their lobbying battles. It will investigate ‘the private life’ of interest groups and specifically how groups internally engage in capacity-building and in the preparation phase of lobbying (Halpin et al. 2017). By analysing their intraorganisational structures this book explains, in a first step, how groups prepare their lobbying activities and, in a second step, why we observe contact, conflict or cooperation of interest groups in the European arena (Beyers and Bruycker 2017). The project explores the question how the internal organisation shapes a group’s activities at the European level and thereby answers two interrelated questions: First, how do interest groups internally organise European affairs? And second, how does the internal organisation affect their lobbying activities at the European level? The book will thereby explain the way in which interest groups internally develop capacity to lobby in a European multi-level policy-making context. This approach allows for a move away from structural explanations, which externalise the causes for differing patterns of group activity at the European level, and considers external effects of internal factors (Farrell and Héritier 2004; Murdoch 2012). The intraorganisational structures are going to be analysed with regard to how groups’ constituent parts, i.e. their members, executive bodies and departments, are integrated in the internal workings of interest organisations. Do groups, for instance, include members in their executive boards or do they have a purely ‘managerial’ executive board? How many departments are involved in the coordination of lobbying activities in European affairs? And how are positions reached and approved within the organisation, before they are being taken to policy-makers and the general public? As will be argued below, the formal and informal organisational relations between interest groups’ constituent parts affect, as will be argued, groups’ agency at the European level.

Interest representation, like other collective action endeavours, is characterised by the inherent tension between, on the one hand, the maximal inclusion of members and of constituent parts in internal processes and, on the other hand, the achievement of efficient performance. If, for instance, a trade union association wants to become active in European social policy-making, it is likely to need the consent of its individual trade union members in order to find a common position and take this position to Brussels. Interest groups, including all types of groups such as trade unions, business associations and non-governmental organisations, address this inbuilt dilemma through different designs of their internal structure. The tension between the inclusion of members and organisational departments or units and group performance is especially pronounced at the European level because the European arena affects national interest groups’ functioning in relation to several aspects, including the distance of decision-making processes, new European issues to communicate to members and the integration of the group in overarching European structures. Interest groups’ and their members’ logistic and mental distance from the European Union acts as a challenge to their balance between the inclusion of members and an optimal performance. I argue that the inbuilt tension between the inclusion of the constituent parts of the organisation and efficient performance becomes tangible in the interaction between interest groups’ organisational structure and the activities of the latter at the European level.

The internal organisational tension becomes tangible along two axes: the horizontal and the vertical axis. On the horizontal axis, groups include different working units in terms of information sharing and exchange throughout the departmental structure. The departmental structure of the group affects the coverage (spread and diversity of contacts) of lobbying venues and cooperation with potential partners. A department is an organisational unit and can designate a unit responsible for specific policy areas, such as social policy or environmental policy, but also a unit responsible for specific services or products, such as accounting, finances or marketing. The second chapter is going to provide more details about what the different configurations of departments can look like. On the vertical axis, groups include their members to different degrees in decision-making processes. The decision-making procedures affect the reactivity, as do the competences of the executive bodies (actionability and capacity to act) of the interest group. Groups can include their members and their managers to different degrees in the decision-making process, and the third chapter is going to explain how intraorganisational decision-making can vary between a high involvement of members, where for instance all trade union members need to give their consent, and a low involvement of members, where leadership can take decisions more autonomously. How groups resolve the tension in their internal structure affects their reactivity and their coverage at the European level. The relationship which groups foster through their intraorganisational structures with their members and constituent parts shapes their activities. The two axes link back to the idea of ‘preparation of lobbying capacity’: departmental coordination (horizontal axis) and member involvement (vertical axis) are crucial processes which explain how and when interest organisations can become active and engage in lobbying activities.

Before proceeding with a review of the existing literature, I provide definitions of the terms which are going to be used throughout the book. An interest group designates a collective actor with the three features of organisation (organised political behaviour), political interests (aims to influence policy outcomes) and informality (no search for public office), as proposed by Beyers, Eising and Maloney (2008). I am going to use the terms interest group and group interchangeably. Interest groups have different types of members: They can be groups with individual members, associations with organisational members, or hybrid forms with both types of members. The term association includes both federations and confederations (Traxler 2010). Leadership (Storey 2016) designates the managing and executive bodies of groups; the latter steers group activities, represents the group in public and can be held accountable in cases of misconduct. A department (Peters and Pierre 2003) is a formally defined unit of a group and its staff specifically deals with one or more defined policy issues. The findings of this book contribute to our understanding of interest group activity in relation to three aspects: First, the book addresses the question of how positions and activities of interest groups in European affairs come about, i.e. how groups prepare to enter their political lobbying battles. Second, the book speaks to the question of how the European multi-level governance system is a challenge to the internal structures of national interest groups and how Europeanisation (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003) is processed at the core of interest organisations. The last chapter of the book is going to clarify that the study’s approach lends itself not only to the study of lobbying in European policy-making, but it is applicable to a large range of interest organisations across different multi-level polity settings. Last, this study explains why we observe group contact, cooperation and conflict for some interest groups in the European Union but not for others. Ultimately, but more indirectly, the analysis also speaks to the question of how these groups fulfil their representational function at the European level by addressing the question where organisational positions and decisions come from.

European affairs (Raunio 2005) is a level of policy-making at which political actors and institutions strive for power and enter into conflicts. It is also a type of policy output stemming from the European institutions. European affairs are, thereby, a horizontal issue area which cuts across traditional policy fields. When referring to European level decision-making, I refer to the decision-making processes between the legislative trio of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The European Council, while officially being an institution of the EU since the entry into force of the treaty of Lisbon,¹ will be of lesser relevance because it is not part of the traditional legislative trio in the co-decision legislative process. This project focuses on the question of how interest groups deal with the European affairs in their internal set-up. European affairs as an issue area is an interesting case for the study of departmental structures and decision-making structures because it is an issue which cuts across other policy issues (Candel and Biesbroek 2016; Peters 1998) and a complex multi-level decision-making arena (Bursens et al. 2016). In the context of globalisation and Europeanisation, European affairs are a showcase to investigate how interest groups deal with political issues in a multi-level context. The European Union (EU) and European affairs are at the centre of the present study for three reasons: The first reason is the observation that political processes in twenty-first century Europe cannot be assessed without taking into account the multi-level nature of policy-making (Bache and Flinders 2004). The EU (Cini and Borragán 2016) is one of the most institutionalised multi-level governance systems (Princen and Kerremans 2008): the amount of decision-making which has been transferred to the European level combined with important opportunities for cooperation and for funding pushes this layer of governance on the agenda of political actors (Bruycker 2017). The EU does not go unnoticed by interest groups any longer and is thereby a showcase example of how interest groups have to deal with politics in multi-layered political systems (López and Tatham 2017). The second reason why European affairs are at the centre of this study is that they serve as an example to assess the impact of the increase of complex and ‘wicked’ policy problems (Head and Alford 2015) on interest group organisation. They refer to complex policy problems which can oftentimes not be dealt with through traditional policy tools (Kassim and Le Galès 2010). The horizontal policy field of European affairs transcends other policy fields and policy-making levels (Candel and Biesbroek 2016; Pollack and Hafner-Burton 2010). As research on national parliaments (Auel and Benz 2005; Raunio 2005) and administrations (Knill 2001) has shown, organisations connect or disconnect European issues, and thereby also the professionals working in European affairs, to one another through their departmental structures. European affairs speak to a certain policy content and can thereby be compared to other horizontal policy issues such as environmental issues (Lafferty and Hovden 2003), gender mainstreaming (McGauran 2009) or new technologies (Suarez Candel 2010). The possibility of comparison with other horizontal issue areas, combined with the increased pressure for interest organisations to deal with European affairs in contemporary policy-making, thus makes them an ideal field to study how groups internally deal with multi-layers and decentralised policy-making processes.

The third reason for the choice of European affairs as a focus of this study is linked to the comparative research design (which will be further explained in the fourth chapter). The analysis investigates national interest groups, which are also subject to different processes and political issues at the national level. The research design ensures that all groups are broadly affected by the same dynamics in the same polity because it uses the European level as a common denominator. By studying interest group organisation of European affairs, it makes the broad selection of groups comparable along the issues and the pressures that they are exposed to. As will be explained in the fourth chapter of the book, the research design of this study allows for an exploration of a most diverse set of interest. As similar studies have shown (Halpin 2014; Halpin, Daujberg and Schvartzman 2011), a case-orientation is a fruitful and necessary venture to study interest organisational behaviour because of both conceptual and empirical insights. The analytical framework will be applied to different groups from different institutional settings and the study thereby shows that the analytical tools are generalisable across a wide array of interest organisations. In the overall argument that interest groups shape the preparation process of their lobbying activity through their internal organisation and thereby favour a certain lobbying behaviour, the comparative case study design thus allows to show the general applicability of the concepts and the analytical framework of this work.

The context of this study is the period of 2014–15. During this period several policy and political questions are at the forefront of European politics, including the question of the Brexit referendum and the insecurity of the outcome of the latter, the coming into office of a new European Commission under Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, just as policy questions including he European Internal Digital Market, European Financial and Banking regulation and European-level regulation of insurances and pension schemes. The national interest groups which I analyse in the empirical part of the study come from Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom and include trade unions, business associations and consumer protection organisations. As will be shown in the empirical parts of the study, the European political context and the insecurities which arise from the latter are going to affect all of these groups (to a higher or lower degree).

The book illuminates the question where interest group positions in European affairs come from, from a structural and procedural point of view. The book thereby complements other approaches to the study of interest group politics in the EU and opens an internal perspective on intere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to the private life of groups
• 2 To have or not to have a European affairs department?
• 3 To include or not to include members in decision-making?
• 4 Research design, case selection, methods and data collection
• 5 Coordinating European affairs activity internally: the empirical analysis of groups’ horizontal organisation
• 6 Reaching an organisational decision in European affairs: the empirical analysis of groups’ vertical organisation
• 7 Four organisational types
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Index