Interest organizations across economic sectors: explaining interest group density in the European Union

ABSTRACT

The number of interest organizations (density) varies across policy domains, political issues and economic sectors. This shapes the nature and outcomes of interest representation. In this contribution, we explain the density of interest organizations per economic sector in the European Union on the basis of political and economic institutional factors. Focusing on business interest representation, we show that economic institutions structure the ‘supply’ of interest organizations by affecting the number of potential constituents, the resources available for lobbying and the geographical level of collective action of businesses. In contrast, we do not find consistent evidence that political institutions produce ‘demand’ for interest organizations by making laws, developing public policy or spending money. This is in contrast to the extensive evidence that such factors affect lobbying practices. The European Union interest system is (partially) shaped by economic factors, relatively independent from public policy or institutions.

KEY WORDS:

• Business interest representation
• European Union
• interest groups
• lobbying

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research project 461-10-519.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website (doi: 10.1080/13501763.2015.1008549).

Notes

1 See: http://www.intereuro.eu/. The logic and structure of this project is described by Beyers et al. (2014).

2 Please note that we are talking about market integration rather than policy integration.

3 Please note that we use the term ‘institutions' in the same manner as Salisbury (1984), including among others ‘individual corporations, state and local governments, universities, think tanks' and various other non-membership organizations (64).

4 As a robustness check, we also assessed our regression models using 2008–10 density data. This does not substantially change the results presented.

5 ISIC stands for International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities and is the statistical standard proposed by the United Nations. For precise descriptions of each sector, please see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcst.asp?Cl=27. The use of the ISIC scheme makes it possible to use data collected by Eurostat. Please note that ISIC (rev. 4) is consistent with the EU-standard NACE (rev. 2). NACE stands for Nomenclature statistique des activités économiques dans la Communauté européenne.

6 The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports on a broader range of sectors in their Structural Analysis (STAN) and Structural and Demographic Business Statistics (SDBS) datasets. However, these datasets still do not provide sufficient information on the number of enterprises per sector in all EU countries.

7 http://ec.europa.eu/budget/library/biblio/documents/2009/EU_final_accounts_2009_en.pdf.

8 http://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/mb/html/index.en.html.

9 While there are good reasons for preferring the precision of a polynomial test (Lowery et al. 2010), it is also true that such tests always raise issues of collinearity. This proved especially severe in our case. Thus, we opted for a simpler test of the density dependence hypothesis by including logged values of both number of enterprises and economic value added in the model (see MacArthur and Wilson 1967).

Additional information

Biographical notes

Joost Berkhout is assistant professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam.

Brendan J. Carroll is assistant professor of public administration at the University of Leiden.

Caelesta Braun is assistant professor of public governance at the Utrecht University School of Governance.

Adam W. Chalmers is assistant professor of political science at the University of Leiden.

Tine Destrooper is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp.

David Lowery is the Bruce R. Miller and Dean D. LaVigne Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University.

Simon Otjes is researcher at the Documentation Centre Dutch Political Parties at the University of Groningen.

Anne Rasmussen is professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen.