Who says what to whom? Alignments and arguments in EU policy-making

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:

In the EU multilevel polity, domestic interest groups seek to shape EU legislation by accessing both national and EU institutions. Previous studies indicated that institutional and issue contexts as well as organisational characteristics shape their strategies of interest representation.

However, we know much less about how alignments and arguments impact on their participation in EU and national policy consultations. Addressing this gap, we investigate the lobbying strategies of almost 2900 national interest organisations from five member states (Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) on 20 EU directive proposals also bringing a new empirical scope to the study of multilevel interest representation. The findings indicate that alignments and arguments shape the participation of domestic interest groups in consultations on EU policies. We infer from our study that some general predictions of interest group behaviour are overstretched and outline four major variations of interest representation routines.