Issues, preferences and ties: determinants of interest groups' preference attainment in the EU environmental policy

Abstract

Some interest groups are more successful than others in translating their policy preferences into policy outputs at the EU level. This study investigates why this is the case by testing an explanatory framework emphasizing the impact of the policy environment on interest groups' preference attainment during the policy formulation stage of EU legislation in the environmental policy. The findings show that preferences having a median positioning on the policy space and demands for no regulation are more likely to be translated into policy outcomes. The type of interest a group represents, as well as its organizational form, are also found to be strong predictors of preference attainment.

Keywords:

• Consultations
• European Commission
• interest groups
• influence

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Jan Beyers, Raimondas Ibenskas, Gail McElroy, Robert Thomson and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. I thank Thomas Däubler for his help with translating policy position documents written in German. This research benefited from the financial help of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences through its Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme.

Notes

Identifying interest groups–policy-makers interactions for so many organizations raises serious methodological challenges. To circumvent this, the research attempted to approximate these interactions by using a dichotomous variable indicating whether the group participated in other consultation formats implying direct contact with policy-makpolicy-makers. This information was available for three cases only. Using this variable would have implied the loss of 2,451 observations. In addition, the variable was not significant.

All five consultations received media coverage in EU news portals, tackled main topics of the environmental policy, involved the participation of a variety of interest organizations and discussed both technical and political/controversial issues. This makes the five consultations relevant examples of EU environmental policy-making.

Regulatory issues are those issues suggesting extending the scope of EU regulation to new aspects or proposing altogether new regulatory regimes (e.g., including commercial vans in the scope of the regulation on CO₂ emissions).

The value of the likelihood ratio test between model 1 and model 2 is –150, on 5 degrees of freedom, p-value < 0.000.