Opportunity Structures in the EU Multi-Level System

Princen, Sebastiaan; Kerremans, Bart

doi:10.1080/01402380802370484

Cited by 114 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Therefore demand for political expertise is lower than demand for technical expertise. Distributive policy is less complex but much more politicized (Christiansen 1997;Princen and Kerremans 2008;Scharpf 2009). This increases the need for consensus and political information but overall reduces demand for technical information.…”

Section: Policy Makes Politics: Nature Of the Policy Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chameleon pluralism in the EU: an empirical study of the European Commission interest group density and diversity across policy domains

Coen¹,

Katsaitis²

2013

Journal of European Public Policy

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Section: Policy Makes Politics: Nature Of the Policy Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chameleon pluralism in the EU: an empirical study of the European Commission interest group density and diversity across policy domains

Coen¹,

Katsaitis²

2013

Journal of European Public Policy

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“…Usually, one of two main analytical approaches is applied in order to capture how interest organizations responded to these institutional changes: multi-level governance (MLG) (Marks and Hooghe 2001) and Europeanization studies (Cowles, Caporaso, and Risse 2001;Featherstone and Radaelli 2003) dominate the study of vertical interactions. More recently, the concepts of venue shopping and the political construction of scale have also been employed in order to illuminate the behaviour of interest groups in the European Union setting (see Princen and Kerremans 2008).…”

Section: Multilevel Governance and Interest Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interest groups in EU policy-making

Eising¹

2008

Living Rev. Euro. Gov.

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There is a plethora of studies on interest groups in the European Union. While these studies have generated a wealth of insights, it is not actually clear what they have accomplished. This Living Review seeks to identify those areas of interest group studies in which our knowledge is fairly consolidated and in which major research gaps or major controversies can be noted. I argue that these research gaps and controversies stem from both the empirical variance in the interest group landscape and the theoretical segmentation of EU interest group studies. These have been shaped by influences from Comparative Politics, International Relations, Policy Analysis, and Democratic Theory. I suggest that future research should engage to a greater extent in cross-cutting theoretical debates in order to overcome the pronounced demarcation of research areas and in more rigorous theory testing than has sometimes been the case. The article starts by discussing the problem of conceptualizing interest groups before moving on to the fissured theoretical landscape. Thereafter, major research themes are discussed. First, I review the relation between EU institutions and interest groups. Here, I look both into multilevel governance and Europeanization studies that focus on the vertical interaction and into analyses that stress the horizontal segmentation of the EU system in different institutions and sectors. Second, I analyze core themes of EU and comparative interest group studies, namely the issue of collective action, the access of interest groups to policy-makers and their influence on EU policymaking. How to cite this articleOwing to the fact that a Living Reviews article can evolve over time, we recommend to cite the article as follows:Rainer Eising, "Interest groups in EU policy-making", Living Rev.

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“…According to this theory, the relative ability of outside actors to access decision-making arenas is shaped by the openness and receptivity of the political institutions (McAdam et al, 1996). As Princen and Kerremans (2008) remark, political opportunity structures can be understood from two perspectives: one that views political opportunity structures as 'exogenous' to the behaviour of voluntary organizations or as fixed external constraints on voluntary organizations' activities and one that views them as a result of the activities of organization and the outcome of the political process, an 'endogenous' perspective.…”

Section: Theoretical Reflectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%