Who lobbies the European Union? National interest groups in a multilevel polity

Abstract

What explains variation across national interest groups in their amount of lobbying on legislative proposals in the European Union (EU)? We present an argument that leads to the expectation that resource-rich associations engage in more lobbying on EU legislation than other associations. Moreover, we expect business associations to have privileged access to the European Commission and national governments; and citizens' groups to parliaments. Using original data from a survey of 1,417 interest groups in Germany, Ireland and Spain, we find support for these expectations. We conclude that national associations are heavily involved in EU lobbying, but that resource-endowment and type matter for access. The article is of relevance to the literatures on interest groups in the EU, the EU's (alleged) democratic deficit, and the role of civil society in governance beyond the nation state.

Keywords:

• Civil society
• EU legislation
• European Union
• interest groups
• lobbying
• survey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, Grant M1217-G16) and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (Grant SJ2007-61796CPOL). It would have been impossible without the willingness of many interest group officials to respond to our survey. Leonardo Baccini, Patrick Bernhagen, David Coen, Heike Klüver, Andrea Liese, Caelesta Poppelaars, Anne Rasmussen, Bernd Schlipphak and three anonymous reviewers gave helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

We use the term ‘citizens’ groups' to refer to groups whose members or supporters do not have a direct and concentrated material stake in the policies advocated by the association. Among others, this encompasses groups concerned with animal welfare, consumer and environmental protection and international development.

For a more detailed discussion of our approach, see Dür and Mateo (2010). Additional supporting evidence is available in form of an online appendix at https://sites.google.com/site/andduer

http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/parlamentsarchiv/sachgeb/lobbyliste/index.html.

http://www.verbaende.com/files/ueber_verbaende/125ECC5B347540F68A5250EB56AD401E.htm.

Note that this question does not distinguish between activities carried out at the national and the European levels. That is, an association can have direct meetings with political actors on EU legislation in Dublin and participate in a demonstration in Brussels. The distinction between inside and outside lobbying thus does not simply replicate a distinction between national- and EU-level lobbying.

We take the natural logarithm of this variable to take account of outliers.

We added a question on financial resources in the German survey, but only about two-thirds of the associations that filled in the questionnaire also responded to this question. The maximum-likelihood estimate of the polyserial correlation coefficient between our ordinal measure of an association's budget and its staff in advocacy is 0.78 (N = 138).

Note, however, that overall staff and staff working in public affairs are highly correlated (r = 0.69, p < 0.01, N = 542). The regression results reported below do not depend on which measure we use.

Counting the number of policy proposals, recommendations and consultations for which a Directorate General had primary responsibility in 2007 and 2008 leads to a similar result. Here, the top four policy fields are external trade, transport, environmental protection and agriculture. Culture, health and research are the policy fields with the fewest number of proposals. The data for this measure are from the register of Commission documents available at http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/recherche.cfm?CL=en (as of October 2009).

We calculated the means after converting the response codes into absolute values of yearly contacts. For example, an association that responded that it had had one contact in the last two years received a value of 0.5, and one that indicated ‘2–5 times’ a value of 2 (calculated as 3.5 contacts over two years divided by two and rounded to the next integer).

Because of the small number of labour unions in our dataset, making claims about them is not meaningful.

We used R Version 2.13.1 for the statistical analysis.

This is calculated for a German association while keeping the other variables at the mean or (for dichotomous variables) the modal category.