The funding of interest groups in the EU: are the rich getting richer?

ABSTRACT

Governmental subsidies are demand-side factors, which allow governments to ‘mould’ interest group communities. The EU is the worlds’ largest donor and has claimed to use public funds to promote the participation of organized interests in public policy. Previous studies found support for this claim and concluded that EU subsidies help to alleviate existing biases in the system of interest intermediation. In this article, we challenge these findings and argue that scholars paid too little attention to the applications for funding filed by interest groups. Using data collected from a survey of applying organizations, we consider the effect of four types of bias on the attainment of funds. Our results suggest that an organization's financial resources and its past success with applications increase the likelihood of winning a grant. These results question the redistributive aspect of EU funds and compare biases in EU funding with existing biases in the interest intermediation system.

KEYWORDS:

• Bias
• European Union
• European Commission
• government funding
• interest groups

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers, the editors as well as all colleagues met at international conferences for their constructive comments and suggestions on earlier versions. The authors are also indebted to Jens van der Ploeg who worked as research assistant during the early stages of the project. Finally, M. C. thanks Laurentiu Ciobanica for keen insights given during the research phase.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Michele Crepaz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4139-1875

Notes

1 The validity of this finding should however be treated carefully as the distribution of the variable is skewed in favor of EU-15 countries. Future studies might decide to oversample the number of organizations coming from non-EU-15 countries to include more applications from these member states in the analysis.

2 The most frequent category for success is ‘alignment with EU objectives’ (37%) and the most frequent category for failure is ‘too much competition on this topic’ (55%).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michele Crepaz

Michele Crepaz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin. His current research and teaching cover topics in comparative politics, European Union politics, public policy analysis and interest group politics. His work has appeared in the Journal of Public Policy and Interest Group and Advocacy while his latest co-authored book on lobbying regulations was released by Manchester University Press. His research is funded by the Irish Research Council.

Marcel Hanegraaff

Marcel Hanegraaff is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He researches the politics of interest representation in a transnational and EU context, as well as on the functioning of international organizations in the fields of climate change and global trade. His work has appeared, among others, in European Journal of Political Research, Comparative Political Studies, European Union Politics, and Review of International Organizations.