Biasing Politics? Interest Group Participation in EU Policy-Making

Abstract

Does lobbying success in the European Union vary systematically across interest group type? Interest groups lobby the European institutions in order to achieve policy decisions that are in line with their own preferences. While some argue that different types of interest groups are equally able to shape European policy-making, others contend that lobbying success is systematically biased towards some powerful interest groups. The empirical evidence is contradictory as previous studies focused either on a specific interest group type or on a specific policy area so that it is difficult to draw general conclusions. This study therefore presents an extensive empirical analysis of lobbying success across a wide variety of interest groups and policy issues by combining a quantitative text analysis of Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups. The findings are promising as they indicate that lobbying success does not vary systematically across interest group type.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was financially supported by the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, the Landesstiftung Baden-Württemberg, the German Academic Exchange Programme and the Volkswagen Foundation. I would like to thank numerous colleagues and friends who have repeatedly commented on earlier drafts of the article or the entire research project, most notably Gema García Albacete, Doreen Allerkamp, Christian Arnold, Patrick Bayer, Tanja Dannwolf, Oshrat Hochman, Thomas Meyer, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Daniel Stegmüller, Bettina Trüb and Arndt Wonka. Special thanks go to Sabine Saurugger, Thomas Gschwend and in particular Berthold Rittberger for continuous invaluable support throughout the research process.

Notes

1. One directive and one regulation only implement an already signed international convention into European law. Two further issues were not based on one single, but on several consultation papers so that it was not possible to determine one single policy dimension as required by the quantitative text analysis. One regulation only constitutes a mere recodification to already existing legislation.

2. The factor analysis retained only one factor according to the Kaiser criterion which suggests to keep only those factors with Eigenvalues equal or higher than 1. This factor accounts for 83.6 per cent of the variance and the factor loadings are all above 0.88.