Abstract
Policy-specific actor-constellations consisting of party- and group-representatives commonly drive the effective establishment of new policy programmes or changes in existing policies. In the EU multi-level system, the creation of such constellations is complicated because it practically requires consensus on two dimensions: the European public policy at stake and the issue of European integration. This means that, for interest groups with interests in particular policy domains, and with limited interest in the actual issue of European integration, non-Eurosceptic parties must be their main ally in their policy battles. We hypothesise that interest groups with relevant European domain-specific interests will ally with non-Eurosceptic parties, whereas interest groups whose interests are hardly affected by the European policy process will have party-political allies across the full range of positions on European integration. We assess this argument on the basis of an elite-survey of interest group leaders and study group-party dyads in several European countries (i.e., Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia) in a large number of policy domains. Our dependent variable is the group-party dyad and the main independent variables are the European policy interests of the group and the level of Euroscepticism of the party. We broadly find support for our hypotheses. The findings of our study speak to the debate concerning the implications of the politicisation of European integration and, more specifically, the way in which party-political polarisation of Europe may divide domestic interest group systems and potentially drive group and party systems apart.
Highlights
There was a time in which EU decisions could be safely explained on the basis of intra-institutional bargaining between ministries and among the EU institutions
We do not imply that legislators provide interest groups with their most important channel into politics
We mean that party-political conflict contaminates or even dominates the narrow issue conflicts in which interest groups are commonly involved
Summary
There was a time in which EU decisions could be safely explained on the basis of intra-institutional bargaining between ministries and among the EU institutions. Research interests relate to the potential implications of the broader saliency of policy issues on the EU agenda (e.g., Beyers, Dür, & Wonka, 2018; Hanegraaff & Berkhout, 2018) and addresses the politicisation of the EU as a system or European integration as a process (e.g., de Wilde, Leupold, & Schmidtke, 2016; Hutter & Kriesi, 2019), most dramatically observed in contemporary British politics (de Vries, 2018a; Hobolt, 2016) The latter studies indicate a substantial reconfiguration of several party systems in Western Europe, with anti-EU positions featuring heavily on the ‘new’ cleavage (e.g., Hooghe & Marks, 2018; Marks, Hooghe, Nelson, & Edwards, 2006) and at least some sensitivity to contextual, ‘demand-side,’ political factors within narrow, public policy niches (e.g., Klüver, Braun, & Beyers, 2015). We conclude with a discussion of our findings and provide a pathway for future research
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