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ABSTRACT
The influence of interest groups is an important question especially with regard to the role of interest groups for democratic decision-making. Research on EU interest intermediation still lacks analysis of what kind of influence and under which conditions interest groups actually exert influence. This article addresses the question of influence on the basis of an analytical model concentrating on the degree of conflict, structural conditions of interest exertion and the type of interest pursued. These factors are assumed to constitute crucial conditions for the degree to which interest groups manage to change legislative acts. On the basis of three case studies of decision-making in the fields of IT and transport in the EU, the article highlights the dominance of technical over directional influence and the crucial role of the decision-makers' initial interests.
Notes
1. I wish to thank Lisa Hunt for language-editing this article as well as Oliver Treib and the two anonymous referees for their comments.
2. The analysis is based on 45 expert interviews with public and private actors who are either involved in the cases or well informed about the sectors and the issues examined. Of these, 26 interviews were held with actors involved in the transport sector, and 19 with actors involved in the IT sector, with a semi-structured interview technique. These comprised six interviews with public actors of the Directorate General Information Society (DG INFSO) and of the European Parliament, and eight interviews with public actors of the Directorate General Transport and Energy (DG TREN) and the relevant parliamentary committees. Nine of the interviews were telephone interviews with national Headquarters and public interest group members (see Michalowitz Citation2004).
3. For an exception in the US literature, see Gerber Citation1999.
4. A problem with this operationalization is that it yields most explanatory power to cases where the initial intentions of decision-makers and interest groups differ. In cases where both intentions are the same, it is more difficult to attribute influence on the policy outcome to a specific actor. However, such a mind change-oriented definition limits influence to changes that are clearly linked to interest group activities.
5. A confirmed hypothesis of the advocacy coalition framework is that when differentiating between deep core policy preferences, policy core preferences and secondary aspects, policy change is most likely to be achieved between different advocacy coalitions on important secondary aspects of an issue (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith Citation1999: 130–5).
6. Soft opt in means to allow sellers to email to their established database but to prevent them from targeting other potential customers. Companies with a sufficient amount of resources could simply buy established lists.