Legislative Lobbying in Context

The Policy and Polity Determinants of Interest Group Politics in the European Union

Jan Beyers, Caelesta Braun, Heike Klüver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138103764
• eBook ISBN: 9781317392873
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The lack of previous research into political interest groups and taking into account policy-specific and institutional context characteristics is largely due to research designs that have been primarily focused on a small number of policy debates, with the result that contextual characteristics were largely held constant. This book brings together articles from different modules that are part of a larger European Collaborative Research Project, INTEREURO, carried out by research teams in nine different countries under the auspices of the European Science Foundation. The main goal of the book is to analyse strategies, framing and influence processes for a set of 125 legislative proposals submitted by the European Commission, in an effort to better understand the involvement of interest organizations in the decision-making process of the EU. Contributors draw on sophisticated and innovative policy-driven samples of interest group mobilization, allowing them to account systematically for how policy-specific and institutional context factors shape mobilization, lobbying strategies and influence of interest groups on public policy debates in the EU. In this way, the book makes an important contribution to the study of interest groups in the EU and represents the breadth of positions taken in the current literature. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Legislative lobbying in context: towards a conceptual framework of interest group lobbying in the European Union

Heike Klüver, Caelesta Braun and Jan Beyers

ABSTRACT We outline a conceptual framework that identifies and characterizes the contextual nature of interest group politics in the European Union (EU) to better understand variation in interest group mobilization, lobbying strategies and interest group influence. We focus on two sets of contextual factors that affect EU interest group lobbying. First, we argue that interest group activities are shaped by several policy-related factors, namely the complexity, the policy type, the status quo, the salience and the degree of conflict characterizing legislative proposals and the associated issues. Second, we posit that lobbying in the EU is affected by institutional factors that vary within the EU political system, such as the institutional fragmentation within the European Commission and the European Parliament and across different national political systems depending on the patterns of interest intermediation or the vertical and horizontal distribution of powers. Finally, we theorize about the interrelationship between contextual features and interest group properties and summarize the findings of the collection.

1. INTRODUCTION

The role and position of interest groups in the European Union (EU) is a contentious issue. While the Commission actively reaches out to European civil society, the actual impact and involvement of interest groups is widely debated. Journalistic accounts report the alleged influence of thousands of lobbyists¹ or report unethical behaviour by members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who literally adopt interest group proposals.² Recent scholarly analyses report the structural underrepresentation of public interests versus business interests in EU consultation processes and argue that the Commission’s participatory democratic ideal is an unattainable myth (see, for instance, Kohler-Koch and Quittkat [2013]). Moreover, most theoretical approaches about European integration and European policy-making – ranging from neo-functionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, to multi-level governance – emphasize in one way or another the relevance of interest groups. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine how the EU would operate without the informal involvement of non-state stakeholders. When the European Commission (EC) launches a new legislative initiative, this propels political activity of affected stakeholders as they mobilize to shape the outcome of the policy debate in their favour. In addition, the European institutions seek the expertise and support from organized interests, and several EU-level interest groups have been established with the active support of the EC and the European Parliament (EP) (e.g., Bouwen 2004; Broscheid and Coen 2003; Klüver 2013a, 2013b; Mahoney and Beckstrand 2011). Yet, although the actual importance of group politics can hardly be underestimated, the jury is still out as to whether interest group involvement in the EU is systematically biased, or, more specifically, why and how interest group involvement at different EU institutions varies and how to explain this variation.

One of the reasons for this lack of systematic knowledge is that interest group mobilization in the European multi-level and multi-institutional context is a complex affair that remains poorly understood. To begin with, this context is never constant. Policy issues differ extensively in the level of attention they raise among the public, the scope of European competencies, their (technical) complexity and the conflict they cause among stakeholders. In addition to the varying complexity of policy issues, interest groups face a highly fragmented institutional environment. They can seek access to the policy-making process through a wide variety of institutional venues at the European, the national level and even the subnational level. The EU therefore constitutes a promising opportunity structure offering a multitude of access points to interest groups (Richardson 2000). Interest groups can, for instance, by-pass non-responsive governments by directly lobbying the European institutions in Brussels to achieve their policy goals (Marks and McAdam 1996). Hence, interest groups are embedded in a highly complex and multi-layered institutional environment that sometimes constrains, yet in other instances enables, them to successfully pursue their interests.

This collection’s objective is to analyse how the contextual complexity of EU governance affects the involvement of societal stakeholders, more precisely their mobilization, lobbying strategies and influence.³ Our main argument is that the contextual nature of specific policy debates is highly important for interest group lobbying, and that individual interest group features such as interest group type (e.g., non-governmental organization vs business group), interest group resources or geographical level of organization (e.g., national vs European groups) do not alone account for understanding lobbying processes. Nonetheless, this does not mean that group characteristics are irrelevant. Interest group characteristics play an important role for interest group mobilization, strategies and influence. It has been shown, for example, that diffuse interest groups typically lobby, plus gain access to, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) while economic interest groups tend to interact more with the Council or the EC (Dür and Mateo 2012). And not all interest groups are similarly able to ‘venue-shop’ at the European level owing to capacity constraints and the high demands – in terms of resources – posed by the complexity of European policy-making (Beyers and Kerremans 2012; Dür and Matteo 2013; Eising 2007; Quittkat 2011). However, while previous research has paid considerable attention to these individual interest group characteristics, the effect of contextual variables has largely been neglected in previous research. Therefore, this collection aims to tease out how the institutional and policy context in which lobbying takes place explains interest group mobilization, strategies and influence while controlling for other alternative explanatory variables previously identified in the literature.

A large number of interest group studies in the EU traditionally focused on the individual characteristics of interest groups such as their financial resources, their organizational characteristics, their ideological views or their expertise to explain lobbying processes (e.g., Bouwen 2004; Dür and de Bièvre 2007a; Eising 2007). As a result, contextual factors were not always explicitly modelled and controlled for. This might be one of the reasons why interest group scholars have not yet fully analysed the complex interplay between individual interest group behaviour and the overall institutional or policy context in which interest groups operate (see e.g., Bunea and Baumgartner 2014; Dür and de Bièvre 2007b). In our view, lobbying needs to be understood as how individual group behaviours are affected by contextual factors. However, interest group scholars have only recently started to consider how institutional and policy-specific contextual factors affect interest group lobbying in the EU (for example, Bunea [2013]; Klüver [2013a, 2013b]; Mahoney [2007, 2008]; the contributions in this collection).

The lack of previous interest group research taking into account policy-specific and institutional context characteristics is largely owing to research designs that primarily focused on one or just a few policy debates and therefore treated contextual characteristics as a constant. This collection brings together contributions that are part of the larger INTEREURO-project, as well as two contributions from affiliated projects, which analyse and compare mobilization, lobbying strategies and influence for a large number of policy debates.⁴ In order to better understand how the contextual complexity of EU governance affects the mobilization, lobbying strategies and influence of interest groups in the EU, INTEREURO is based on two sampling techniques.⁵ First, a set of 125 legislative proposals submitted by the EC between 2008 and 2010 was sampled, for which the project draws on a sophisticated and innovative policy-centred sample of interest group mobilization, which allows for considerable variation with regard to policy-related and institutional characteristics so that we are able to systematically analyse how policy-specific and institutional context factors shape mobilization, strategies and influence of interest groups in the EU (Beyers et al. 2014; De Bruycker and Beyers forthcoming). Second, this sample was complemented by an organization-centred sampling technique that draws on registries to compile a general overview of all stakeholders in the EU to better understand mobilization biases on specific issues (Baroni et al. 2014; Berkhout et al. 2015).

2. THE POLICY AND POLITY DETERMINANTS OF INTEREST GROUP POLITICS IN THE EU

In this collection, we focus on two sets of contextual factors that affect EU interest group mobilization, strategies and influence. This framework presents a general typology of policy-related and institutional contextual factors that affect interest group mobilization, lobbying strategies and interest group influence in the EU more generally, and, secondly, guides the contributions in this collection. To begin with, interest group activities are shaped by policy-related factors such as the complexity, salience and degree of conflict characterizing legislative proposals initiated by the EC. Furthermore, lobbying in the EU is affected by institutional features where the specific multi-layered structure of the EU requires special attention and leads us to distinguish between two types of factors. First, we have institutional factors that vary within the EU political system, such as between the different institutions involved, the Directorates General (DGs) in charge of specific legislative initiatives or the role of party groups in the EP. Second, we can specifically look at variation across different national political systems depending on the patterns of interest intermediation or the vertical and horizontal distribution of powers and how this affects interest group mobilization, their lobbying strategies and their influence. Finally, we theorize about the interrelationship between contextual features and interest group properties.

2.1. Policy-related factors

A large part of the lobbying activities undertaken by European interest groups seeks to influence and shape EU policy-making. However, legislative proposals and issues are by no means uniform, but differ in a variety of characteristics, and these characteristics have important consequences for lobbying strategies and lobbying success (Baumgartner et al. 2009; Klüver 2013a, 2013b; Mahoney 2007, 2008). In particular, we consider the following contextual factors as relevant for interest group politics in the EU: complexity; policy type; the status quo; salience; degree of conflict; and the size and composition of lobbying coalitions. One can conceive these policy-related factors at multiple levels of a legislative debate. For instance, at the level of a policy area or a particular field, such as the environment, one might distinguish environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) vis-à-vis producer interests. Yet, although such broad cleavages do exist, many policies are characterized by much more fine-grained lines of conflict that cut across these conventionally assumed cleavages (Klüver 2013a). In the INTEREURO-project we assessed policy context factors largely at the level of legislative proposals as submitted by the EC. However, we acknowledge that many pieces of legislation embody multiple issues and are potentially multi-dimensional. Some proposals may be characterized by multiple salient issues, while other proposals may only contain one minor issue of discussion. Interviews with experts in the EP, the EC and with interest group officials led to the identification of an average of four substantive issues per legislative proposal. An issue represents a potential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Legislative lobbying in context: towards a conceptual framework of interest group lobbying in the European Union
• 2. Interest organizations across economic sectors: explaining interest group density in the European Union
• 3. Framing in context: how interest groups employ framing to lobby the European Commission
• 4. ‘Try to see it my way!’ Frame congruence between lobbyists and European Commission officials
• 5. Institutions, policies, and arguments: context and strategy in EU policy framing
• 6. The alignment of parties and interest groups in EU legislative politics. A tale of two different worlds?
• 7. Comparing the domestic and the EU lobbying context: perceived agenda-setting influence in the multi-level system of the European Union
• 8. Information or context: what accounts for positional proximity between the European Commission and lobbyists?
• Index