Short-term volatility in the EU interest community

Abstract

We know remarkably little about the volatility of vital rates of organizations lobbying the European Union (EU), in large part because of the limited and problematic nature of data on the EU interest community. After discussing these problems, we try to develop a better assessment of the short term – 2003 to 2009 – volatility of birth and death rates of the EU interest community using data from the Consultation, the European Commission and Civil Society (CONECCS) lobby registration system of the European Commission and the door pass system for lobbyists of the European Parliament. We find that the EU interest system is surprisingly volatile even over the short term.

Keywords:

• European Union
• interest groups
• lobbying

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank the three JEPP referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

In their analysis of lobbying turnover in the interest communities of the US states, Gray and Lowery (1995) found leaving lobby registration rolls occurred for quite different reasons for different kinds of organizations. When organizations with members (membership groups and associations of organizations, such as trade associations) leave, the organization itself typically ceased to exist. When free standing institutions leave (typically firms and governments), the organization was more commonly just going back to its regular line of work and could re-enter the lobbying list in the future.

Retrospective research using the EP registry has been compromised by the fact that the European Parliament webmaster has now ‘protected’ its website against archiving from early 2007 (according to the Standard for Robot Exclusion [SRE]).

In 2004–5, the register would usually fluctuate between 2,000 and 2,200 organizations (about 3,000 individual lobbyist passes). After 2005, it fluctuated between 1,400 and 1,600 organizations. From 2008 onwards, ‘express’ or temporary passes are indicated in the online list.

Again, the percentage figures reported under the values in the figures represent the proportion of the organizations registered in that year constituted by the groups surviving until 2007.

With its less restrictive registration criteria and the annual pass renewal requirement, the EP register, unsurprisingly, shows higher birth and mortality rates than does the CONECCS registry.

The EP register is updated regularly (daily/weekly). Thus, the figures we report rely on snapshots of every couple of months.

Figure 3 was replicated for the full population of EP registrants that we could obtain from September 2005 onward, albeit without a rigorous check of names, as discussed earlier. The resulting figure (available on request from the authors) appears remarkably similar to that reported in Figure 3, but with somewhat higher levels of mortality (likely owing to name changes) and somewhat greater curvilinearity. The survival rate of the organizations in the A sample is 23 per cent (2003–9) and of the full population 13 per cent (2005–9).

In case we would treat these ‘hibernating’ organizations as continuously present in the system, the mortality line would be somewhat higher and a bit less steep (figure available on request from the authors).

As was done for Figure 3, Figure 4 was also replicated for the full population of EP registrants in 2009, albeit again without a rigorous check of names, as discussed earlier. The resulting figure (available on request from the authors) appears remarkably similar to that reported in Figure 4. Again, a strongly U-shaped distribution was evident in the structure of the full population.

The types of organization have been differentiated by a word search in the names of the organizations (words used: association; europ*). This may slightly underestimate the categories because certain associations are registered by abbreviation only.