Adapting to Europe? Business interests and civil society groups in accession countries

West European Politics (WEP) covers political and social issues in Western Europe. It has a substantial reviews section and coverage of all national elections in Western Europe.

Its comprehensive scope, embracing all the major political and social developments in all West European countries, including the European Union, makes it important reading for both political practitioners and academics.This article forms part of a special issue: Multilevel Interest Representation in the European Union: The Role of National Interest Organisations

Abstract:

While the Europeanisation of national interest groups is an important research agenda in the EU, very little research examines their Europeanisation outside the EU, and during the EU accession process.

The article fills this gap by focusing on Europeanisation of interest groups in Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Using new survey data, the article looks at interest groups’ involvement in the national pre-accession process, and their activity at the EU level. The main argument of the paper stresses the absence of significant differences between the levels of Europeanisation of business and other types of interest groups (especially NGOs) in the current phase of EU accession.

The regression analyses provide support to this argument, showing that access to national institutions, resources, the Europeanisation of policy areas and dependence on EU funding account for interest groups’ levels of Europeanisation, while variations across group types are not very significant.