Jan Beyers

Researching Interest Group Politics in Europe and Elsewhere: Much We Study, Little We Know?

While understanding interest group systems remains crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies, the study of interest groups remains a somewhat niche field within political science. Nevertheless, during the last 15 years, the academic interest in group politics has grown and we reflect on the state of the current literature. The main objective is to take stock, consider the main empirical and theoretical/conceptual achievements, but most importantly, to reflect upon potential fertile future research avenues. In our view interest group studies would be reinvigorated and would benefit from being reintegrated within the broader field of political science, and more particularly, the comparative study of government.

Critical resource dependencies and the Europeanization of domestic interest groups

Abstract Although EU institutions and policies create additional opportunities for national interest groups to influence policy-making, not all domestic groups make use of the extended niche provided by the EU. Lagging Europeanization has often been explained by resource-based accounts; for instance, the groups staff resources or financial strength determines the ability to Europeanize. This article explores an alternative explanation and analyses the importance of ties that bind national interest groups to their constituencies, their critical resource dependencies and their immediate environment. Our main conclusion is that Europeanization is not just shaped by properties of the EU system, but also by the interest groups embeddedness in its immediate environment.

Policy Issues, Organisational Format and the Political Strategies of Interest Organisations

Contemporaneously, the study of EU lobbying appears somewhat disconnected from other sub-areas within the study of EU politics. Research tends to be focused on single issues – either particularistic or directional – and concentrates on communicative interaction modes that emphasise network governance, ignoring the electoral side of politics. This essays main objective is to make the politics component of interest group politics more intelligible. The core argument is that interest group strategies, as well as potential influence, are not adequately explained by resources only. In response to this, a framework is built that links different interaction modes (arguing, bargaining and voting) with political strategies (inside and outside), organisational formats and the nature of political issues.

CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES IN THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN SOCIALIZATION

Socialization is an important concept in contemporary empirical studies on European integration and politics. However, the existing empirical research differs substantially in terms of research design, operationalization and measurement as well as analytical categories. Yet, despite these divergences, some relevant conclusions can be drawn from this somewhat disparate literature, conclusions which nuance the view of the European arena as a key socialization site. This essay offers a critical assessment of the socialization literature and aims to identify some fruitful avenues for future research. It argues that socialization research faces conceptual and methodological challenges with regard to process–product ambiguity, the notion of internalization and the temporal nature of socialization processes.

The European rescue of the federal state: how Europeanisation shapes the Belgian state

This article investigates the impact of European integration on the Belgian federal polity. In particular, we substantiate two propositions. First, we show that European integration stimulates Regions, Communities and central government to cooperate. Second, Europe prevents the central government level from disappearing. Europeanisation seems to have a centralising effect on some parts of the Belgian polity. In general, the constitutionally dual nature of the Belgian federation has, due to European influences, incrementally evolved into a practice of cooperation and joint decision-making. These conclusions are supported by an in-depth exploration of five policy areas: the overall domestic European coordination procedures, environmental policy, agricultural policy, social policy and the European treaty negotiations.

Ties that count : explaining interest group access to policymakers

The degree to which interest groups gain access to policymakers has often been explained by focusing on the exchange of resources in a dyadic relation between interest groups and policymakers. This article argues that the position an interest group occupies within a coalition and the relations it has outside its coalition substantially affect the likelihood of gaining access to policymakers. Our empirical focus is on the Dutch interest group system for which we examine how coalitions among groups and the network position of interest groups within and between such coalitions shape access. The analysis, based on data collected among 107 Dutch interest groups and 28 policymakers, leads to the conclusion that network positions count differently for elected and non-elected officials, and that network ties that bridge different coalitions add significant explanatory leverage to resource-based explanations of access.

Legislative lobbying in context : towards a conceptual framework of interest group lobbying in the European Union

ABSTRACT We outline a conceptual framework that identifies and characterizes the contextual nature of interest group politics in the European Union (EU) to better understand variation in interest group mobilization, lobbying strategies and interest group influence. We focus on two sets of contextual factors that affect EU interest group lobbying. First, we argue that interest group activities are shaped by several policy-related factors, namely the complexity, the policy type, the status quo, the salience and the degree of conflict characterizing legislative proposals and the associated issues. Second, we posit that lobbying in the EU is affected by institutional factors that vary within the EU political system, such as the institutional fragmentation within the European Commission and the European Parliament and across different national political systems depending on the patterns of interest intermediation or the vertical and horizontal distribution of powers. Finally, we theorize about the interrelationship between contextual features and interest group properties and summarize the findings of the collection.

Nationality and European Negotiations: The Working Groups of The Council of Ministers

This article explores the communication networks of negotiators in the working groups of the Council of Ministers of the European Union. We employ data collected by interviewing diplomats and civil servants involved in these working groups. These data enable us to explore the role of discretion in a more systematic fashion. We show that negotiation behaviour at the micro-level can be affected by influence esteem, professional esteem, ideological esteem and organization self-esteem. Our approach offers an insight into the world of the men and women involved in day-to-day negotiations and can as such be considered a starting point for more systematic empirical research.

Open the door to more of the same? The development of interest group representation at the WTO

The openness of the World Trade Organization (WTO) towards non-state actors has led to much debate among scholars and practitioners. The objective of this paper is to add empirical knowledge to this ongoing debate. In particular, we examine the effects of allowing interest groups to participate at WTO Ministerial Conferences (MCs) during 1996–2009 by analyzing a novel dataset of 1992 interest organizations that attended seven MCs. The data we present demonstrate that, in contrast to what many expected, the WTO did not attract a more diverse population of interest groups since these organizations were allowed to participate at MCs. Moreover, we observe an increasing overrepresentation of some specific issue-related interests, especially agriculture, and a strong presence of Northern American and European interest organizations attending MCs. Another important observation is that MCs are not particularly dominated by business interests at the expense of NGOs (non-governmental organization), who are also consistently well represented at the WTO meetings. Yet, the high levels of volatility observed at the level of individual organizations suggests that, although it is rather easy to start lobbying at WTO MCs, only a relatively small number of interest organizations keep a long lobbying presence at this level.

Balanced or Biased? Interest Groups and Legislative Lobbying in the European News Media

This article examines the coverage of legislative lobbying in European news media. The starting point thereby is that lobbying in the crowded European Union (EU)-level interest community is not only a struggle for direct access to policymakers, but that in order to realize policy goals many interest groups rely on political attention generated by the media. Our main research question is how media attention is skewed toward particular interests and which factors explain these varying levels of prominence. Our empirical analysis is based on a set of 125 legislative proposals adopted by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010. For all these cases we identified 379 interest organizations that made public statements, we coded the amount of media attention these organized interests gained, the type of statements they made as well as some key organizational features. While the aggregate levels of attention look pretty balanced, our evidence shows that media prominence is skewed toward particular types of interests; in particular that organized interests which oppose a proposed policy gain significantly higher levels of media attention.