Providing information and building capacity: interest group involvement in the application of EU law

Abstract

Practical implementation has attracted significant scholarly attention in the European Union in the last decade, and the EU compliance literature started to focus more on the players in the domestic arena to help understand the application of EU law. However, a systematic analysis on interest group activities at the application stage is yet to be conducted. Relying on enforcement and management approaches, this article argues that interest groups act as providers of legal and technical information that are needed for correct application of EU law. Also, interest groups actively demand information from political actors to build internal capacity during this period. The results show that interest groups act as providers of information, but only in the national political arena. Moreover, motivation to learn is another factor that explains the level of access seeking during application, and this type of interaction takes place in both European and national venues.

Keywords:

• Practical implementation
• compliance
• European Union
• interest groups
• access seeking

Notes

1. http://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/Global/eu-unit/reports-briefings/2016/Complaint%20to%20European%20Commission%20-Poland%20forest.pdf

2. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1948_en.htm

3. http://europa.eu/!xP34ww

4. http://ec.europa.eu/atwork/applying-eu-law/complaints_en.htm

5. See Online Appendix I for the list of policy issues included in the sample.

6. Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Spanish, and Swedish.

7. The questions of the survey can be found in Online Appendix II.

8. See Online Appendix III for the full table.

9. A total of four text answers were assigned to one of the motivation categories.

10. The strongest correlation is between providing technical and legal information, which is 0.21.