Individual and collective representation: the organisational form of higher education lobbying in the European Union

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarly work on higher education institutions (HEIs) within an EU context has focused on how universities and their core activities have been affected by EU education policy. The organisation of HEIs in order to shape European decision-making on higher education, mainly through their presence in Brussels, has received much less attention. This article therefore focuses on how HEIs organise their EU representation and explains their choice for a specific organisational form, distinguishing between individual (i.e. a Brussels office), collective (i.e. via an association) and mixed representation (the combination of both a Brussels office and membership of an association). After systematically mapping the organisational form of 250 HEIs, we apply a mixed methods design to test our hypotheses derived from previous research on interest representation and lobbying. Our findings illustrate that the distance from Brussels is a key factor in the decision to open a Brussels office or join an association, whereas financial resources appear imperative for combining both forms of representation. Furthermore, we identify additional underlying motives for choosing a particular mode of representation, in particular the importance of information exchange, visibility and networking.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• representation
• lobbying
• organisational form
• European Union

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all respondents who participated in our qualitative research for their valuable input as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data support the published claims and are available in the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/uc29w/?view_only=4c952a441d624d62b02543c7fe6dac50.

Consent to participate and for publication

All respondents have either signed an informed consent form or have given their explicit consent for participation and publication.

Notes

1 Note that Donas and Beyers (2013) use the term direct instead of individual representation, even though it has an identical meaning.

Additional information

Funding

The authors did not receive support from any organisation for the submitted work.

Notes on contributors

T. Paulissen

Toine Paulissen is a PhD researcher and teaching assistant at the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute. His research focuses on comparative and European politics with a special interest for interest representation, direct democracy, political finance and the European Union.

B. Fraussen

Bert Fraussen is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs at Leiden University. Bert Fraussen's research agenda focuses on interest representation and lobbying, as well as how policymakers can ensure the effective and inclusive engagement of societal stakeholders in public governance.

S. Van Hecke

Steven Van Hecke is a political scientist and associate professor in Comparative and EU Politics at the KU Leuven Public Governance Institute. His research agenda is at the intersection of comparative politics, EU studies and political history. Publications focus on European political parties and foundations, EU institutions and European integration history.