Lobbying activity and fora creation in the EU: empirically exploring the nature of the policy good

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative look at lobbying activity and the emergence of institutional fora in the European Union (EU). Specifically, the paper explores why the number of interest representatives differs across policy domains, and why we find institutionalized fora for interest representation for some policy issues but not others. Building on a strategic lobbying model, the paper shows empirically that Commission activity influences interest group activity, and that increased activity leads to the creation of fora. This conforms to our assertion that the creation of lobbying insiders is a reaction to lobbying overload. We also find that distributive policy domains have fewer lobbying groups than regulatory policy domains. This is unsurprising, considering that regulation is the area of greatest EU policy output. Conversely, lower levels of lobbying activity in distributive policy domains indicate that these are still highly intergovernmental and encourage multi-level venue shopping.

Keywords:

• European Commission
• European Union
• interest groups
• lobbying
• regulatory and redistributive policy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the 2003 meeting of the American Political Science Association and the 2004 Conference of Europeanists. We would like to thank Frank Baumgartner, Pieter Bouwen, John Constantelos, Jürgen Feick, Fabio Franchino, Wyn Grant, Christine Ingebritsen, Jeremy Richardson, Sabine Saurugger, Jörg Teuber, and Cornelia Woll for their helpful comments on this and earlier versions of the paper.

Notes

1. We provide a formalization of our theory in Broscheid and Coen (2003); here, we present an intuitive summary of our argument.

2. Following game-theoretic conventions, we denote the first moving actor in an interaction with the female pronoun.

3. Although CONECCS relies on self-reported entries, we believe that it provides valid data for our inquiry. First, our theory refers to actors who have incurred the expertise and costs of credible lobbying. It is likely that the database weeds out those groups that are not serious participants in EU lobbying. Second, the database excludes those actors that do not interact with the Commission.

4. Our count of policy-related units is based on the European Commission Directory, http://ec.europa.eu/staffdir/index.htm, accessed 22 July 2006.

5. The size of the DG workforce is based on the number of positions listed in the European Commission Directory, http://ec.europa.eu/staffdir/index.htm, accessed 22 July 2006.

6. Lowi (1972) and Wilson (1990) distinguish between distributive and redistributive policies. As both types of policies deal with the distribution of material values, it is not necessary, for our purposes, to distinguish between them.

7. Special thanks go to Fabio Franchino and Cornelia Woll.

8. We thank Fabio Franchino for permission to use his Commission portfolio data.

9. These results are not reported here, but the authors will provide the results on request.

10. An alternative reaction to access overload is the consolidation of interest representatives into larger organizations. We do not pursue this possibility in the present study.

11. A similar study in which we used the Conneccs data produced slightly different results than the ones presented here (Broscheid and Coen 2006). However, we believe that the EU register of expert groups is the superior measure of the number of fora for interest representation. Nevertheless, caveat lector.