Abstract
The EU offers a variety of access points through which interest groups can attempt to influence policy-making. In this paper, we analyze differences in the use of these access points, or venues, by interest groups. Considering the roles played by different EU institutions along the policy cycle, we argue that the venues differ by the extent to which they encourage lobbying from different interest groups. Analyzing survey responses by more than 700 European interest associations, we find that the distribution of access-seeking by business and non-business actors differs across venues. Reflecting its pivotal role at the pre-proposal stage, the Commission encourages non-business organizations to spend much of their finite lobbying resources. In the context of the European Parliament, non-business groups are not only interested in influencing its decisions, but also in connecting to ordinary Members of the European Parliament. Business groups, for their part, apply greater resources to the rapporteurs. Finally, we show that business groups also allocate their resources to regulatory agencies at the implementation stage in the policy process, where incomplete legislative contracts are finalized and non-business groups’ resources are depleted.
Highlights
The European Union (EU), like many Western political systems, is facing a crisis of legitimacy
Drawing on insights from the literatures on business lobbying, venue shopping and elite pluralism, we developed a theoretical argument and testable hypotheses to account for differences and similarities in the extent to which interest groups seek access to the main EU policy-making venues
Thereby, our analysis contributes to the understanding of strategies of inside lobbying by different types of interest group at venues involved in all stages of the policy-making process in the EU and within two different venues in the European Parliament
Summary
The European Union (EU), like many Western political systems, is facing a crisis of legitimacy. Several studies have analyzed groups’ strategies to seek and gain access to different venues in the EU from a multi-level perspective (Ehrlich and Jones 2017; Dür and Mateo 2016; Beyers 2002) They distinguish a national route where organizations lobby national-level institutions to influence European policy-making, and a Brussels route where they directly target actors and institutions at the supranational level. These categories have been assigned integers from 1 (“did not seek access”) to 5 (“At least once a week”) Using this scale, the frequency of access has been probed for five different institutional actors in four venues at the EU level, which include the three main legislative institutions, the Commission, Council and Parliament, as well as European regulatory agencies.
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