LOBBYING OF ORGANISED INTERESTS: THE CAPACITY AND RESOURCES OF PRIVATE BUSINESS INTEREST ORGANISATIONS (original) (raw)
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The question of interest group influence is central for both scholars interested in studying policy-making in the EU and those concerned with the legitimacy of decisionmaking in that entity. Many hypotheses exist that stress a series of factors possibly shaping interest group influence. Nevertheless, only few studies have tried empirically to examine these hypotheses for the case of the EU. What is more, existing empirical studies report contradictory findings. To help researchers advance upon this state of the art, three obstacles that impede research dealing with interest group influence in the EU are discussed: defining the terms 'power' and 'influence'; accounting for different pathways to influence; and measuring influence. In addition to this, several ways to address these obstacles are advanced: by taking a pragmatic approach with respect to defining influence and power; by being conscious that actors may use different pathways to influence when drawing conclusions about interest group influence; and by combining different methods when measuring influence.
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The public affairs and lobbying industry represents an extremely relevant and fascinating field of observation to political analysts and to everyone engaged in the comprehension of complex political and economic environments such as the European one. To analyse how the influence of power works and what role interest groups and the various actors of a political system play in public decision-making processes is extremely useful to understand those processes and how the system operates. That is why, in collecting the data and all the points of view provided in the various chapters of this volume, we hope to have laid down the basis for a new and more complete perspective on what European democracy is today. The intellectual datum here is that understanding interest group systems remains crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies, especially in an era when these democracies are becoming increasingly embedded in supranational policy networks. (Beyers, Eising and Maloney 2008, 1104) The main aim of this volume is to fertilize the ground for further research and for the development of new and stronger theories, able to explain what are the conditions and the factors affecting the development of public affairs in a country, the regulation of lobbying, the relationship between interest groups and traditional political actors, the weight of institutional frameworks, the influence of the European integration process on national developments, etc. The widest part of scientific literature on lobbying and interest groups seems to focus on the theoretical and historical analysis of interest groups and their role in democratic systems (Bentley
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Business lobbying is widespread in the European Union (EU). But because not all lobbying is successful, the question arises: when does business win and when does it lose in the context of legislative policy-making in the EU? We argue that business actors are, overall, less successful than citizen groups in the European policy process. However, they can protect their interests if interest group conflict is low or the role of the European Parliament is restricted. A new dataset on the positions of more than one thousand non-state actors with respect to 70 legislative acts proposed by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010 allows us to evaluate this argument. Empirical support for our expectations is highly robust. Our findings have implications for the literature on legislative decision-making in the EU and for research on non-state actors in international organizations.
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More than half a century ago, James March (1955: 432) stressed the importance of measuring interest group influence when stating:“Influence is to the study of decision-making what force is to the study of motion—a generic explanation for the basic observable phenomena.” Little can be added to this affirmation; an analysis of interest group influence remains of crucial importance to an understanding of political processes.
European Journal of Political Research, 2015
Different types of interest groups use different lobbying strategies. This article presents an investigation of this already well‐established hypothesis once more, but additionally proposes that the institutional framework of the country in which interest groups operate also influences their lobbying behaviour. More specifically, it is shown that groups working in the interest of the public are better integrated into the policy‐making process when direct democratic instruments, such as referendums, occur regularly (as in Switzerland) than when referendums are the exception (Germany). The article demonstrates that Swiss cause groups – often also referred to as ‘public interest groups’ in the literature – use a more balanced mixture of insider and outsider strategies than their German peers, but also that this moderating effect cannot be found for specific interest groups, such as industry groups or unions.