Domestic European Union Coordination and Interest Group Mobilization in Three Member States: Looking Beyond the Formal Mechanisms

Abstract

One conclusion in the literature on domestic European Union (EU) coordination is that the formal institutional properties of countries—devolved versus centralized or unitary—affect the nature of coordination practices. Basically, the view has emerged that domestic coordination is a largely bureaucratic process in which political control mechanisms remain relatively weak. Instead of only looking at public authorities and their formal networks, this article relies on a data set that allows us to analyse informal political-administrative networks and look at how societal interests mobilize and target policymakers in order to shape the position governments defend at the EU level. One of our conclusions is that despite devolution in Belgium, its intergovernmental coordination shows a considerable level of network centralization, even when compared to unitary countries such as France and the Netherlands, meaning that there are large differences between the three states with respect to the connectedness of the actors involved.

Key Words:

• Interest groups
• European Union
• regions
• domestic coordination

Notes

¹ In Belgium, cabinets, or the ministerial private offices, consist of personal collaborators of ministers. These collaborators are chosen by the ministers out of ideologically related organizations (parties, interest groups, think tanks) and appear and disappear with their ministers (spoil system).

² The division between president (broad orientations, high-level issues) and prime minister (day-to-day technical legislation) can become blurred in times of cohabitation, when the executive becomes two-headed and sometimes even divided (Menon, 2001: 79).