Exploring Information Exchange among Interest Groups: A Text-Reuse Approach (original) (raw)
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The purpose of this analysis is to present and test an information processing theory of interest group influence in the EU. While it has long been acknowledged that information is the currency of lobbying in the EU, a systematic examination of how interest groups gather, generate, synthesise, and transmit information to decision-makers is still missing. I posit that interest group influence is a function of a group's ability to efficiently process information. Conceptualising influence in this way not only brings the study of influence in-line with key insights from the larger interest group literature, but it also helps avoid some serious methodological issues related to measuring influence. Using data from a large-scale online survey and elite interviews I compare how information processing varies across six different types of interest groups. The results suggest that most types of interest groups in the EU have similar information processing capabilities and thus, that influence in the EU appears to be, on balance, fair and impartial.
Language at the Heart of Lobbying Dynamics -A Quantitative Approach to Interest Group Research
Language at the Heart of Lobbying Dynamics -A Quantitative Approach to Interest Group Research, 2022
Within the issue area of lobbying dynamics in the European Union, the measurement of interest group success is heavily debated among scholars. This research examines the influence interest groups had in shaping the Artificial Intelligence Act via the Public Consultation process. In contrast to existing literature, a computer assisted quantitative content analysis was used to gain insights into lobbying processes, thus avoiding influencing the outcome of the study through interviews with the investigated political actors. The research design puts specific emphasize on the direct exchange of information as the key resource that influences success, thus analyzing the exercise of power rather than the bases of power. The findings thus have twofold implications for the grander lobbying literature. Next to the common empirical findings the aim of this paper is to elaborate upon the methodological challenges of interest group research and why policy position and therefore success of interest groups ought to be analyzed via a quantitative content analysis rather than interviews of lobbyists or public officials. From an empirical standpoint, the findings suggest that the smaller coalition of civil society interest groups achieved greater levels of success than anticipated, but more importantly, the applied method showed that analysis of interest groups can happen via usage of algorithms, thus avoiding bias.
Profiling the EU lobby organizations in Banking and Finance
Applied Network Science, 2018
Creating a map of actors and their leanings is important for policy makers and stakeholders in the European Commission's 'Better Regulation Agenda'. We explore publicly available information about the European lobby organizations from the Transparency Register, and from the open public consultations in the area of Banking and Finance. We consider three complementary types of information about lobbying organizations: (i) their formal categorization in the Transparency Register, (ii) their responses to the public consultations, and (iii) their self-declared goals and activities. We consider responses to the consultations as the most relevant indicator of the actual leaning of an individual lobbyist. We partition and cluster the organizations according to their demonstrated interests and the similarities among their responses. Thus each lobby organization is assigned a profile which shows its prevailing interest in consultations' topics, similar organizations in interests and responses, and a prototypical question and answer. We combine methods from network analysis, clustering, and text mining to obtain these profiles. Due to the non-homogeneous consultations, we find that it is crucial to first construct a response network based on interests in consultations topics, and only then proceed with more detailed analysis of the actual answers to consultations. The results provide a first step in the understanding of how lobby organizations engage in the policy making process.
Interest group networks in the European Union
European Journal of Political Research, 2021
Interest group networks are crucial for understanding European Union (EU) integration, policymaking and interest representation. Yet, comparative analysis of interest organisation networks across EU policy areas is limited. This study provides the first large-scale investigation of interest group information networks across all EU policy domains. We argue that interest groups prioritise access to trustworthy and high-quality information coming from partners with shared policy goals. Thus, interest organisations form network ties with other organisations if the latter are from the same country, represent the same type of interest, or are policy insiders. The effect of these three factors varies across policy domains depending on the extent to which the institutional setting assures equal and broad organisational access to decision-making. Our empirical analysis operationalises information ties as Twitterfollower relationships among 7,388 interest organisations. In the first step of the analysis, we use Exponential Random Graph Models to examine tie formation in the full network and across 40 policy domains. We find strong but variable effects of country and interest type homophily and policy insiderness on the creation of network ties. In the second step, we examine how the effect of these three variables on tie formation varies with policy domain characteristics. We find that shared interest type and policy insiderness are less relevant for tie formation in (re-)distributive and especially regulatory policy domains characterised by more supranational decision-making. Sharing an interest type and being a policy insider matters more for tie formation in foreign and interior policies where decision-making is more intergovernmental. The effect of country homophily is less clearly related to policy type and decision-making mode. Our findings emphasise the importance of institutional and policy context in shaping interest group networks in the EU.
Investigaciones Regionales - Journal of Regional Research, 2020
Cohesion Policy accounts for the European Union main investment budget and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this field are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of policy’s impact and of the role the EU plays therein. This issue is relevant, as communication of social policy is central to the emergence of the European public sphere, an acknowledged condition to foster European integration. In this work we aim at advancing research on the European public sphere through an analysis of the social media communication of EU cohesion policy by ten LMAs. We build on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic techniques of analysis and highlight three main results: first, ‘horizontal Europeanization’ takes place on social media; second, Europeanization occurs both as the spontaneous integration of shared discontent expressed by citizens, and by the institutionalization of top-down ...
European Union Politics, 2016
Little firm knowledge exists about the allocation of the Council's political attention across policy areas and over time. This article presents a new dataset of the date, duration, and policy coding of more than 70,000 meetings of Council working parties, covering all areas of the Council's policy activities between 1995 and 2014. In terms of both scope and resolution, the data allow for the generation of unprecedented insights into what issues occupy the Council's agenda, how that varies between and within policy areas, and how that changes over time. After discussing conceptual issues and explaining the construction of the dataset, the article demonstrates its usefulness and versatility through analyses of the Council's political attention at various levels of aggregation.
The Influence of Interest groups on EU Legislation
2022
It is uncontested that interest groups play a central role for European policymaking and democratic legitimacy, although their specific impact and involvement are controversial. This brings up the question how influential interest groups are in the EU’s legislative process and under which conditions. The scientific literature has just rather recently started to try to conduct large-N studies by applying the automated analysis tool “Wordfish”. However, there is a methodological debate regarding the ability of such tools to generate valid results. Hence, this study also wanted to find out how congruent the results of human coding and computer-assisted text analysis are in the field of interest group research. Although, this study is mainly based on the theory of exchange, it also considers contextual factors. In order to compare the validity of the two types of analysis and to check the hypotheses, the public consultation on the Digital Services Act package was selected as a case study. The preference attainment approach is followed to measure the influence that interest groups exerted on the EU. While the analysis revealed that the hand-coded estimates seem to indeed capture policy preferences accurately, the original approach in the literature falls short of a more complex reality. Instead, results can differ a lot depending on which policy issues were identified and considered in the analysis. However, the results of the analysis with Wordfish barely matched the hand-coded scores of any composition of issues. Apart from that, it turned out to be extremely difficult to properly determine the EU’s position before the consultation. Hence, it would be rather far-fetched to make reasonable statements about the extent to which interest groups could exert influence on the EU. Nevertheless, future research should not dismiss Wordfish or automated analysis in general, but keep in mind the pitfalls that can come along while trying to find a way to use such tools to generate as valid results as human coding does.
Journal of Public Affairs, 2020
Drawing from work on deliberation and information-access, this paper conceptually frames why and when different types of interests mobilize across the parliamentary policy cycle. We posit that each policy stage holds its own deliberative purpose and logic, leading to a variation in the type and volume of information demanded. The legitimacy of the expertise interest groups provide is affected by their organizational characteristics. To ensure the smooth flow of the policy process, members of parliament encourage groups that legitimately hold relevant information to mobilize at each policy stage, while lobbyists choose to mobilize when their expertise allows them to better influence policy-makers' debates. We test our argument in the context of the European Parliament, following a unique survey of the 8th legislature (2014–2019). The responses lend support to our model. In a policy process that contains various stages of deliberation, different organizations hold an information expertise key that gives them access at different stages. Significantly, less studied groups, such as think tanks and consultancies, mobilize well ahead of others in the cycle's initial phases; while lobbyists representing public constituencies dominate in the final stages. The paper contributes to broader theoretical discussions on pluralism, bias, and deliberation in policy-making.
There still is a lack of research on and understanding of the relations between the EU institutions and private actors, especially in the context of EU enlargement"1
West European Politics, 2021
This article traces the origins of European legislation during the legislative policy-making process. It identifies three phases where parts of the text of legislative acts can be developed: (1) agenda-setting; (2) intra-institutional decision-making and (3) interinstitutional negotiations, depending on whether the content of the legislation originates respectively in the Commission proposal, the co-legislators' positions or trilogue negotiations. Using a newly developed text-mining technique which computes in which phase each word of a legislative act originally appears, the article examines the relative importance of each phase and explores how it is affected by interinstitutional conflict. Applying this method to 219 legislative acts adopted between 2012 and 2018, it finds that most EU legislation originates in the agenda-setting phase, and that the new content developed during trilogue negotiations is limited. However, the importance of the agenda-setting phase decreases in cases with high levels of interinstitutional conflict.