Interest Group Influence in the EU (INTEREURO)

How much influence do corporations, citizen groups, and other lobbyists have on policy outcomes in the EU? These questions are highly relevant both for debates on the democratic legitimacy of the EU and for our understanding of the European policy-making process. The normative implications of these questions are particularly significant at a time when governments and academics aim to address a perceived democratic deficit by increasing political participation by societal groups. Would such participatory engineering broaden the democratic input to EU politics or merely lead to increased influence by special interests? Despite the normative and substantive importance of this question, there is surprisingly little research on the policy consequences of interest representation in the EU. The few contributions made to date are largely based on case studies. While these have unearthed valuable insights, their mainly qualitative nature limits the inferences that can be drawn from their findings. Furthermore, the logic of bureaucratic lobbying is less well understood than legislative lobbying. The aim of this module is to improve on this state of the art by developing and empirically testing a theory of interest group influence in the EU. The argument is based on the assumption that interest representation can mainly be understood as the strategic transmission of information from interest groups to decision-makers. For the empirical examination of our argument, we will systematically collect data on the representation of interests in the EU. Building on interviews and the coding of policy papers and other documents, we will establish the preferences of all actors that participated in the decision-making process on 120 legislative proposals in the EU. The data collection will be carried out in close coordination with the partners in the ESF project. The specific contribution of the Austrian team will be 70 interviews with officials in the Permanent Representations of the EU member states in Brussels and the coding of policy papers. We will disseminate the research results to the academic community through publications (conference papers, journal articles and a monograph) and to the policymaking community through a conference and a policy paper.

The aim of this project was to contribute to a better understanding of the influence of interest groups in the European Union (EU). Given this objective, we collected data on the lobbying of interest groups with respect to 70 legislative proposals put forward by the European Commission. In total, we gathered data on more than 1,000 interest groups active on these proposals. We then compared the preferences of these interest groups with respect to the legislative proposals (e.g. does a group favour an EU-wide regulation on coach and bus passenger rights?) to the outcomes of the legislative process (e.g. was an EU-wide regulation on coach and bus passenger rights passed?). A key finding that emerged from this research is that business actors are far less successful in influencing EU decision-making than often expected. In fact, they are less successful in attaining legislative outcomes that are favourable to them than groups defending broad interests such as environmental or consumer protection. What explains this finding? In the current phase of European integration, most legislative activity is about higher levels of regulation at the European level. This concerns environmental protection, animal welfare, public health, consumer protection and so on. For example, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the EU decided to better protect consumers of financial services. On such issues, the majority of business interests generally defend the low-regulation status quo. But in doing so, they lack an institutional ally: both the European Commission and the European Parliament have an institutional interest in pushing for relatively far-reaching legislation, as such legislation strengthens the role these institutions can play in the process of European integration. These two institutional actors therefore find themselves in an informal coalition with citizen groups defending broad interests. In the face of such a broad coalition, it is no wonder that business interests routinely find themselves on the losing side. On some issues, there is still another mechanism that restricts business influence: citizen groups often have an advantage in mobilizing and shaping public opinion. Our research clearly shows that interest groups can affect public opinion; but some arguments especially those often used by citizen groups matter more than others. Citizen groups, for example, had a large effect on the negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) by mobilizing the public. The key conclusion that emerges from our research thus is that fears about rampant business power in the EU are exaggerated. Clearly, business lobbying matters in limiting the ambition of environmental, consumer and health regulation in the EU. But more often than not, business interests actually lose important lobbying battles.