‘Try to see it my way!’ Frame congruence between lobbyists and European Commission officials

ABSTRACT

We study how frame congruence – the degree to which key policy-makers’ frames correspond to the frames of lobbyists – is distributed between different types of interest groups. We argue that two contextual factors are particularly important for whether the frames of business interests dominate those of civil society interests in the minds of European Commission officials. First, the broader the scope of the conflict, i.e., the more affected interests active in the process, the more difficult it will be to promote narrow self-regarding frames, a fact that benefits civil society interests. Second, as business dominates the media coverage of European Union legislative proposals, the more publicity the proposals receive the higher the frame congruence of business lobbyists and Commission officials. Our empirical analysis is based on 144 face-to-face interviews with Commission officials and lobbyists in relation to 55 legislative proposals that were put forward by the Commission during 2008–10.

KEY WORDS:

• European Union
• framing
• lobbying
• media

FUNDING

This work was supported by the European Science Foundation [grant number 10-ECRP-008], the Research Foundation-Flanders [grant number GA 171-11N] and the Swedish Research Council [grant number 429-2010-7184].

Notes

1 The remaining 18 advocates were coded as ‘other’, a category including institutions, professional associations and governmental actors.

2 Interviews with Commission officials were conducted by David Marshall, Daniel Rasch and Patrycja Rozbicka. Interviews with EU-level interest groups were conducted by Sarah Arras, Jan Beyers, Iskander de Bruycker, Frederik Heylen, Meta Novak, Patrycja Rozbicka and Douwe Truijens. David Marshall provided much appreciated input in the planning stage of the interviews.

3 For a discussion and test of different methods for measuring frames, see Boräng et al. (2014).

4 Four responses could not be reliably categorized, which is why the table includes 85 of the 89 interest group responses.

5 We also ran likelihood-ratio tests with Media and Scope as control variables, but found that they did not improve the fit of model 1.

6 For example, when Media is at 6 the predicted probability of frame congruence for civil society actors is 0.46 and for business 0.13 (p < 0.05).

Additional information

Biographical notes

Frida Boräng is assistant professor at the Department of Political Science, the Quality of Government Institute and the Centre for European Research (CERGU), at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Daniel Naurin is professor at the Department of Political Science, and the Centre for European Research (CERGU), at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.