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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 diff erentiate system, policy
domain and organisational factors and examine their eff ects 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
fi ndings suggest that the EU is less of a sui generis system than commonly assumed
and imply the need for more fi ne-grained analyses of interest group diversity.

AbstractThis article asks why public officials perceive some interest groups as influential for policy outcomes. Theoretically, we rely on resource exchange and behavioral approaches. Perceived influence of interest groups does not only follow from the policy capacities they bring to the table; it also relates to the extent to which public officials consider groups as policy insiders. Both effects are assumed to be conditional on advocacy salience, i.e., the number of stakeholders mobilized in each legislative proposal. We rely on a new dataset of 103 prominent interest groups involved in 28 legislative proposals passed between 2015 and 2016 at the European Union level. Our findings show that interest groups associated with high analytical and political capacities are perceived as more influential for final policy outcomes than other groups with less policy capacities. Yet, in policy issues with high advocacy salience, interest groups characterized by higher 'insiderness' are perceived as more influential among public officials.

The bureaucratic reputation literature stipulates that bureaucracies strategically aim to maximize reputational benefits and minimize reputational damages through targeted communication strategies. Departing from this assumption and using an extensive dataset on the media coverage of 54 legislative acts, we examine the conditions under which commissioners appear in the news and which communication strategies they pursue. Our analyses show that commissioners are more likely to appear in news coverage in the context of technically complex issues. We find that if a regulation is less politically conflictual, they are more likely to promote the commission's policy preferences, whereas they adopt a more passive style of communication in the face of political conflict. The findings further our understanding of regulatory policymaking by explaining bureaucratic behaviour through a communicational lens.

AbstractContemporary governance is increasingly characterized by the consultation of different types of stakeholders, such as interest groups representing economic and citizen interests, as well as public and private institutions, such as public authorities and firms. Previous research has demonstrated that public officials use a variety of tools to involve these actors in policymaking. Yet, we have limited knowledge on how particular consultation approaches relate to stakeholder participation. To what extent do open, closed and hybrid consultation approaches, with the first two, respectively, referring to the use of public and targeted tools, and the third one implying a combination of both of them, relate to the policy engagement of a different set of stakeholders? In this paper, we identify the different tools used by the European Commission to engage stakeholders in policymaking and assess how variation in consultation approaches relates to stakeholder participation via a descriptive and multivariate analysis. We rely on two datasets: a regulatory database that contains detailed information on 41 EU regulations and a stakeholder database that comprises 2617 stakeholders that were involved in these regulations through different consultation tools. Our main finding is that implementing different consultation approaches affects stakeholder diversity. Specifically, closed consultation approaches lead to a lower level of business dominance than hybrid approaches that combine open and targeted consultation tools.

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 diff erentiate system, policy domain and organisational factors and examine their eff ects 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 fi ndings suggest that the EU is less of a sui generis system than commonly assumed and imply the need for more fi ne-grained analyses of interest group diversity.

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.

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.