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.

The MNC‐Coalition Paradox: Issue Salience, Foreign Firms and the General Data Protection Regulation

“…While such theorizing is becoming increasingly accepted in EU studies, some scholars argue that increased salience can actually create room for governments to exercise their own prerogatives by choosing between those business group interests that best fit the state's goals (Woll, 2013). Others assert that increased salience, while brewing conflict, inevitably privileges the voices of the largest coalitions (Klüver et al, 2015a). Salience can have differential impacts on the business communitywith smaller, nationally oriented firms that are seen as more legitimate defeating their transnational 'big business' counterparts (Keller, 2016).…”

Controlling corporate influence in health policy making? An assessment of the implementation of article 5.3 of the World Health Organization framework convention on tobacco control

“…By residual opportunities we refer to the unregulated administrative space created by selective and incomplete implementation, which either leaves existing political strategies unaffected or permits tobacco companies to adapt their strategies to take advantage of gaps in implementation (hereafter opportunities for policy influence unless stated otherwise). This assumption reflects a finding common to both the political science and public health literatures: corporations select political strategies with reference to the institutional and policy contexts in which they operate [25–31]. We seek to map the potential for opportunities for policy influence against a conceptual framework developed from studies on venue shopping [32–36], and corporate political activity based primarily on analyses of internal tobacco industry documents [16, 17].…”

Responsiveness to Different National Interests: Voting Behaviour on Genetically Modified Organisms in the Council of the European Union

“…The third form, national structural and sectoral interests and their influence on EU politics has been theorized by scholars such as Scharpf (), Moravcsik () and Kohler‐Koch (). Empirically, the influence of national sectoral interests on voting behaviour in the Council has not yet been evaluated comprehensively, despite the vast literature on lobbying activities in the European Union, which, however, have mainly studied the institutional contexts of the Commission and the European Parliament (for an overview, see Klüver et al, ). Concerning the influence of structural interests, some evidence may be contained in the early studies that identified a north–south division between Member States (Kaeding and Selck, ; Mattila, ; Zimmer et al, ).…”