Legislative Lobbying in Context. The Policy and Polity Determinants of Interest Group Politics in the European Union

The lack of previous research into political interest groups and taking into account policy-specific and institutional context characteristics is largely due to research designs that have been primarily focused on a small number of policy debates, with the result that contextual characteristics were largely held constant.

This book brings together articles from different modules that are part of a larger European Collaborative Research Project, INTEREURO, carried out by research teams in nine different countries under the auspices of the European Science Foundation. The main goal of the book is to analyse strategies, framing and influence processes for a set of 125 legislative proposals submitted by the European Commission, in an effort to better understand the involvement of interest organizations in the decision-making process of the EU.

Contributors draw on sophisticated and innovative policy-driven samples of interest group mobilization, allowing them to account systematically for how policy-specific and institutional context factors shape mobilization, lobbying strategies and influence of interest groups on public policy debates in the EU. In this way, the book makes an important contribution to the study of interest groups in the EU and represents the breadth of positions taken in the current literature.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Table of Contents

1. Legislative lobbying in context: towards a conceptual framework of interest group lobbying in the European Union Heike Klüver, Caelesta Braun and Jan Beyers

2. Interest organizations across economic sectors: explaining interest group density in the European Union Joost Berkhout, Brendan J. Carroll, Caelesta Braun, Adam W. Chalmers, Tine Destrooper, David Lowery, Simon Otjes and Anne Rasmussen

3. Framing in context: how interest groups employ framing to lobby the European Commission Heike Klüver, Christine Mahoney and Marc Opper

4. ‘Try to see it my way!’ Frame congruence between lobbyists and European Commission officials Frida Boräng and Daniel Naurin

5. Institutions, policies, and arguments: context and strategy in EU policy framing Rainer Eising, Daniel Rasch and Patrycja Rozbicka

6. The alignment of parties and interest groups in EU legislative politics. A tale of two different worlds? Jan Beyers, Iskander De Bruycker and Inger Baller

7. Comparing the domestic and the EU lobbying context: perceived agenda-setting influence in the multi-level system of the European Union Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz and Anne Rasmussen

8. Information or context: what accounts for positional proximity between the European Commission and lobbyists? Patrick Bernhagen, Andreas Dür and David Marshall