Two logics of NGO advocacy: understanding inside and outside lobbying on EU environmental policies

ABSTRACT

Contributions by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to European governance supposedly enhance participatory democracy. It matters for this democratic surplus how NGOs foster relationships to both policy-makers and publics by engaging in inside and outside lobbying on European Union policies. This article investigates the factors that explain this lobbying behaviour. It contrasts organization-level hypotheses on the NGOs’ relational and resource characteristics with issue-level hypotheses on the complexity, salience and beneficiary group of the policy issue. Expectations are formulated under the assumption that different logics of influence and reputation drive inside and outside lobbying by NGOs. The findings suggest that issue-level characteristics have more explanatory power than organization-level factors. More salient, less complex issues and issues involving a public good have significantly higher odds of outside lobbying, while public goods attract less inside lobbying. The logic of reputation seems to capture outside lobbying, while the logic driving inside lobbying remains more puzzling.

KEY WORDS:

• European Union
• inside lobbying
• interest groups
• NGOs
• outside lobbying
• participation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the fellow researchers and friends who have commented on the research design or on earlier drafts of the article, most notably Tanja Börzel, Heike Klüver, Joost Berkhout, Jan Beyers and William Maloney. Special thanks go to Pieter de Wilde and Tabea Palmtag for continuous support and encouragement throughout the research process. I would also like to thank the JEPP referees for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

1 Five newspapers were selected: TAZ and Die Welt at German national level and The Guardian, The Financial Times (London) and European Voice to approximate a European media landscape. The first four papers have a wide distribution and variance in political spectrum (centre/left, centre/right), correcting for biases in particular papers. The European Voice comes closest to a transnational European newspaper, but is too specialized to capture discussions in the European public alone. The European press is still largely constituted by national media covering transnational topics. For this reason, two national British papers were included, which are distributed beyond Britain to an English-speaking readership. All searches included ‘EU’ or ‘Europe’, as the research interest lies in EU policy processes. Besides, the search terms were simple variations of the policy subject. All searches took place between August 2010 and January 2014. The duration of one year was used for each search and arranged symmetrically around the time of the public consultation to capture both outside lobbying that leads and that follows the institutional interest in the policy.

2 In cases of transnational NGOs receiving parts of their funding from national counterparts, the percentage of German national member funds was taken as a proxy to calculate the member share at transnational level.

3 The same models were also run clustering for policy issues (eight clusters), instead of NGOs (48 clusters). The results for outside lobbying are relatively robust to this testing, while those for inside lobbying are not. However, with such a low number of clusters (eight) standard errors are not accurate and tests tend to over-reject. Future research should enable accurate clustering per issue by sampling a larger number of issues.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wiebke Marie Junk

Biographical note

Wiebke Marie Junk studied at the University of Oxford, Sciences Po Paris and the Free University Berlin, where she recently completed her MA in International Relations.