Marcel Hanegraaff

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.

Transnational Advocacy over Time: Business and NGO Mobilization at UN Climate Summits

Currently two contrasting perspectives dominate the literature on interest group community development. The collective action perspective presumes that interest group communities tend to be dominated by groups with few obstacles for political mobilization. The neo-pluralist perspective instead stresses that many interest group communities have inherent balancing mechanisms, assuring that over time these communities become increasingly diverse. Both perspectives, however, have primarily been developed and used in domestic settings. I argue that these traditional perspectives also are highly useful in studying transnational interest group communities. I analyze the mobilization patterns of 6,655 interest groups active at UN climate summits between 1995 and 2011. While the results mostly confirm a neo-pluralist perspective, which entails more diverse mobilization patterns, business and highly specialized interests did have a clear, and possibly crucial, advantage in the early stages of development.

The domestic and global origins of transnational advocacy: explaining lobbying presence during WTO ministerial conferences

This article explains varying levels of transnational advocacy initiated by domestic organized interests. Theoretically, we integrate the constraining and enabling impact of the domestic context with factors related to global opportunity structures. We test our hypotheses with an original data set consisting of all national organized interests that attended the Ministerial Conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the period 1995 through 2011. Instead of viewing transnational advocacy as a reaction to a lack of domestic political attention and an attempt to compensate for domestic deprivation, our analyses actually show the opposite. Organized interests that originate from democratic, mostly wealthy countries, and that enjoy robust access to domestic resources, are much more responsive to shifts in the global policy agenda. More generally, our analysis of the factors that drive transnational advocacy point at the irrelevance to artificially juxtapose domestic and global explanations.

Is the EU different? Comparing the diversity of national and EU-level systems of interest organisations

Abstract The European Union interest group population is often characterised as being biased towards business and detached from its constituency base. Many scholars attribute this to institutional factors unique to the EU. Yet, assessing whether or not the EU is indeed unique in this regard requires a comparative research design. We compare the EU interest group population with those in four member states: France, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. We differentiate system, policy domain and organisational factors and examine their effects on interest group diversity. Our results show that the EU interest system is not more biased towards the representation of business interests than the other systems. Moreover, EU interest organisations are not more detached from their constituents than those in the studied countries. Everywhere, business interest associations seem to be better capable of representing their members’ interests than civil society groups. These findings suggest that the EU is less of a sui generis system than commonly assumed and imply the need for more fine-grained analyses of interest group diversity.

Balancing Inside and Outside Lobbying: The Political Strategies of Lobbyists at Global Diplomatic Conferences

This article seeks to explain the use of inside and outside lobbying by organised interests at global diplomatic conferences. At first sight, the lobbying at these venues is puzzling as it does not seem to be a very fruitful way to acquire influence. The use of outside strategies especially is perplexing because most aspects of international negotiations fall outside of the purview of national constituencies. It is argued in this article, however, that the presence of outside lobbying is not so puzzling if lobbying is seen both as a way to attain influence and as a way to pursue organisational maintenance goals. Empirically, the article draws on interview data with 232 interest group representatives that participated at either the 2012 session of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Geneva, or the 2011 (Durban) and 2012 (Doha) United Nations Climate Conferences. The analysis demonstrates that organisational needs, and especially the competition actors face in obtaining resources, significantly affects the relative focus of organised interests on inside and outside lobbying.

Making Inference across Mobilisation and Influence Research: Comparing Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mapping of Interest Systems:

Scholars of mobilisation and policy influence employ two quite different approaches to mapping interest group systems. Those interested in research questions on mobilisation typically rely on a bottom-up mapping strategy in order to characterise the total size and composition of interest group communities. Researchers with an interest in policy influence usually rely on a top-down strategy in which the mapping of politically active organisations depends on samples of specific policies. But some scholars also use top-down data gathered for other research questions on mobilisation (and vice versa). However, it is currently unclear how valid such large-N data for different types of research questions are. We illustrate our argument by addressing these questions using unique data sets drawn from the INTEREURO project on lobbying in the European Union and the European Union’s Transparency Register. Our findings suggest that top-down and bottom-up mapping strategies lead to profoundly different maps of interest group communities.

WTO Judicial Politics and EU Trade Policy: Business Associations as Vessels of Special Interest?

This article: Contributes to the literature on interest groups showing how the interplay of domestic and international institutional structures critically affects the character of lobbying. Contributes to a better understanding of EU trade politics, highlighting how such processes are systematically affected by changes in global governance structures. Traces empirically how important institutional innovations were introduced in EU trade policy making in order to adapt to reform of the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. Offers systematic empirical evidence about the evolution of the character of dispute settlement cases initiated by the EU in the WTO. Shows empirically how business associations traditionally active in EU trade policy making increasingly act as ‘vessels’ of narrow and specialized interests. This article focuses on the effects of the WTO’s quasi-judicial system of dispute resolution on the politics of trade policy making in the European Union (EU). We argue that this institutional innovation had a systematic transformative effect on EU trade politics, creating pressures for institutional adaptation and changing the character of organized trade policy lobbying. On the one hand, the new environment of the WTO created pressures for the EU to implement significant institutional innovations to ease access for private parties and generate an influx of information to strengthen offensive market access actions. On the other hand, this reform directly affected firms’ incentives to mobilize politically, creating incentives for specialized lobbying. The empirical analysis shows how these two processes ultimately led to a re-organization of trade policy lobbying in the EU and compelled European business associations to become increasingly receptive to the demands of special interests.

Explaining varying lobbying styles across the Atlantic: an empirical test of the cultural and institutional explanations

There is consensus in the literature that policymaking in the United States (US) and Europe generates different lobbying styles. Two explanations for these differences have been developed so far. The first posits that distinct lobbying styles reflect different political cultures . The second attributes distinct lobbying styles to variation in the institutional context in which lobbyists operate. Studies that have analysed lobbying within the US and Europe and assessed the relative importance of these arguments are problematic because both explanations are consistent with observed differences in lobbying style. In this article, we circumvent problems of observational equivalence by focussing on European and American lobbyists who are active in a similar institutional venue – that is, international diplomatic conferences. Relying on evidence collected at World Trade Organization Ministerial Conferences and United Nation Climate Summits, we tested the relevance of alternative explanations for the variation in lobbying styles between European and American lobbyists. Our results give robust support to the institutional argument.

Towards a population ecology approach of transnational advocacy? An emerging research field

The number and scope of transnational organizations has risen markedly during the past decades. According to the Union of International Associations (UIA), each year over a thousand transnational organizations are established, and as a result in 2012 the UIA estimated the existence of no less than 7,608 intergovernmental and an astonishing number of 56,834 nongovernmental organizations (see www.uia.be). Given the sheer size of political organizations active in transnational political processes, this chapter argues that the global environment provides an extremely rich setting for studying the organizational development of interest group communities. Unfortunately, interest group scholars have not yet taken full advantage of this rich laboratory, in our opinion mostly because the literature on transnational advocacy developed rather separately from existing interest group studies. We nonetheless see many parallels and overlaps between these literatures, for instance, in terms of key research questions that are asked as well as methodological issues. This chapter, therefore, reviews the transnational advocacy literature from an interest group perspective and in doing so we aim to identify the common ground between both fields as well as some relevant challenges.

Mapping the WTO Interest Group System: Exploring Density, Diversity, and Stability Over Time

The relationship between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and interest groups has been and still is a contentious topic in many political and scholarly debates.1 One of the key issues in these debates is the access that the WTO offers to a variety of interest groups wanting to participate in trade policy making. Although access to the WTO’s predecessor, the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), was always limited, since the establishment of the WTO in 1995 the number of access opportunities has slowly grown. Despite these new opportunities the level of openness of the WTO to societal interests is still among the lowest of all international organizations (Van den Bossche 2008). Many interest groups, in particular nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), have consequently contended that the WTO needs to become more responsive to their input (Steffek and Kissling 2006).2 The call for more openness to interest groups on the part of the WTO has been much discussed in academic circles, attracting both proponents and opponents. Many students of international trade argue that in order to increase its expertise, accountability, and legitimacy, the WTO should allow a higher number of more diverse societal interests access to its decision-making process (Charnovitz 2000; Robertson 2000; Scholte 2000).3 Opponents contend that the WTO should uphold its system of limited access for interest groups. Given the inherently biased nature of interest group systems, they argue, interest groups from developed countries would likely dominate the scene (Fried 1997; Spiro 2000).