Critical resource dependencies and the Europeanization of domestic interest groups

Abstract

Although EU institutions and policies create additional opportunities for national interest groups to influence policy-making, not all domestic groups make use of the extended niche provided by the EU. Lagging Europeanization has often been explained by resource-based accounts; for instance, the group's staff resources or financial strength determines the ability to Europeanize. This article explores an alternative explanation and analyses the importance of ties that bind national interest groups to their constituencies, their critical resource dependencies and their immediate environment. Our main conclusion is that Europeanization is not just shaped by properties of the EU system, but also by the interest group's embeddedness in its immediate environment.

Keywords:

• Critical resource dependencies
• Europeanization
• interest groups
• organizational maintenance.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper forms part of a larger project financed by the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders on the political strategies of interest groups that seek access to and influence over the EU's external trade policies with regard to the WTO (G.0187.02). The project has been developed in co-operation with researchers from the University of Leuven, Leiden University, Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin and CEVIPOF Paris. The authors acknowledge the constructive comments and feedback received from Joost Berkhout, Jan Erk, David Coen, David Lowery and the two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Another general perspective on this matter is Hirschman's exit, voice and loyalty framework which has been applied by several EU scholars (Hirschman 1970; Coen 1997, 1998; Bennett 1999; Trondal and Veggeland 2003; Bartolini 2005; Kohler-Koch 2005). The idea is – in a nutshell – that the process of European integration provides opportunities for domestic interests so that they are able to exit the iron cage of domestic politics and voice their concerns at the European level. As European integration tends to weaken the usefulness of exclusive national strategies, many interests are stimulated to direct their attention to Europe. However, organizations that are highly dependent on the benefits they receive from their immediate environment and/or that are highly connected to domestic constituencies, show a low propensity to exit the domestic level. Being Europeanized is therefore typical for groups that offer less direct benefits to their members or that depend less on exchange relations with their constituencies. Also, organizations that depend only weakly for their survival on domestic institutions (for instance, because they receive only a small amount of subsidies from domestic agencies) will more easily transcend national borders. Thus, it is not necessarily the absence or the modesty of key resources that explains the low or high level of Europeanization. The key is that interest groups, whether they are resourceful or not, should be less dependent on resources or benefits they gain from their immediate environment. To put it differently, rather than the amount of resources available, it is, in Hirschman's framework, the presence or absence of exit options at the national level that affects the extent to which organizations are Europeanized (see also Marks and McAdam 1999).

2. Our project also includes public officials – 146 representatives of government institutions, parliamentarians and political parties – and how they interact with interest groups, but because public officials are not directly relevant to the problem we deal with in this paper, we do not pay extensive attention to the interviews conducted with them. The same project also includes 139 EU-level interest groups and public officials.

3. Because the larger project deals with trade policy-making, we focus especially on sources which list interest groups that are potentially active in this sector. The WTO website (www.wto.org) contains a number of useful sources ranging from listings of interest groups and civil society organizations attending ministerial conferences, expert meetings, position papers delivered to the WTO, and so on. Second, Directorate-General Trade of the European Commission has established a Civil Society Dialogue, an open process of consultation to which interest groups may subscribe (http://trade-info.cec.eu.int/civil_soc/intro1.php). Also from this source we retained Euro-level, Belgian, French, German and Dutch actors. Third, we coded all interest groups mentioned in a policy event dataset that was developed for the purpose of this project. Fourth, we added Euro-level, Belgian, French, German and Dutch actors listed in the WTO history project, University of Washington (http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist). All these selected groups were coded on the basis of a number of variables such as type of interests (employers, trade unions, NGOs), policy sector in which a group is active, and so on.

4. There is another aspect that needs to be clarified, namely the fact that the sample size differs considerably from country to country. The bigger sample of Belgium and France compared to the smaller sample for Germany is especially noteworthy. Our sampling was aimed at a structurally equivalent and comparable sample across countries; this does not necessarily mean samples of an equal size. As such, specific institutional and political conditions within the four countries explain the different sample sizes. Two factors explain the size of the Belgian sample. First, there is the specific nature of the Belgian federation which results in a fairly fragmented interest group system. For instance, whereas in most other countries we find one environmental peak association, Belgium has four environmental peak associations, one for each of the sub-states (Bursens 1997). In addition to this, interest representation by labour unions is quite fragmented with different sectoral and cross-sectoral unions linked to the socialist, liberal and catholic pillars. The fragmentation of the trade union system is even more pronounced for France and explains the larger sample compared to Germany and, to some extent, the Netherlands. In Germany the existence of one large cross-sectoral trade union and its cross-sectoral satellites led to an identification of 15 trade unions of which 13 were sampled. A similar procedure in France led to the identification of 65 trade unions of which only 36 could be sampled.