Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article builds on the growing literature on lobbying in a multilevel context. Whereas previous studies have sought to explain why national groups start lobbying at the transnational level, this articles examines the policy positions of interest groups once they are active at this level. The main argument is that group type is a key factor for explaining the level of interest group support for states, yet the effect of group type is conditional on the institutional and issue contexts. The data for analysis are derived from 198 interviews conducted with representatives from businesses and NGOs at the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization and the UN Climate Summit negotiations in 2011 and 2012. The results confirm that business groups support states much more often than NGOs do. Yet, the amount of support varies substantially across a country's level of development and democracy, and the salience of issues.

The promise of global governance? -- Does global governance empower developing country mobilization? -- Inequalities in access to global policymaking? -- Has the rise of transnational advocacy triggered the emergence of a global public sphere? -- Is a global public sphere emerging through interactions among stakeholders?

Current research on interest-group influence in the European Union tends to focus on just one stage of the policy cycle, being agenda setting, the legislative process or (some aspects) of the implementation stage. We argue that this bifurcation of the research agenda is a serious shortcoming, as lobby dynamics may vary throughout different consecutive policymaking stages. As a consequence, lobby gains or losses in the legislative stage can be overturned in the implementation. This research note therefore explores how the influence of interest organisations travels across different stages of the policy cycle, most importantly between the legislative stage and the implementation stage. First, we observe that as policymaking is a continuous rather than a static process, also lobbying tends to stretch beyond the legislative stage. Second, we argue that the specific characteristics of the implementation vis-à-vis the legislative stage may structurally favour business and resourceful organisations over smaller groups and nongovernmental organisationss. Third, we illustrate the plausibility of our argument by means of an in-depth case study: the European Union Industrial Emissions Directive. We conclude with a call for a more integral approach to researching lobby powers throughout the policy cycle and provide a preliminary agenda for future research.

AbstractIn this study we test whether interest organizations that are confrontational towards EU institutions are less successful than their more cooperative counterparts in obtaining funding from the European Commission (EC). The transfer of public funds to interest organizations is a key dynamic in state-civil society relationships. Research shows that organizations, especially public groups, often heavily rely on public funds to the point that, without funds, many would cease to exist. 'Don't bite the hand that feeds you' is thus a popular expression among leaders of organizations who apply for funds. Scholars document a widespread perception among group leaders that a confrontational attitude towards the state can lead to curtail of public funds. This perception is based on the assumption that state institutions use public funding to discipline confrontational interest organizations. We test this assumption using quantitative and qualitative data collected from a survey of 270 interest organizations who applied for EC funding between 2015 and 2018. Our findings suggest that, while almost half of our survey respondents feel that critical attitudes towards the EU would have negative consequences for their funding applications, empirically, confrontational and cooperative organizations have the same chances of obtaining EC grants. This finding is robust across different interest organization categories, including when non-applicants and mortality anxiety are considered in the analysis. The results add a new layer to resource dependency theory pointing at the incongruence between an organization's perception of its relationship with public institutions and the observation of that relationship.

AbstractNumerous empirical studies suggest that global interest communities are heavily biased in favor of wealthier countries. This research note critically reviews these works suggesting that they (i) lack a benchmark to assess the biased nature of global interest communities and (ii) conflate the concepts of "wealth" (based on GDP per capita) and "economic power" (based on GDP) into one analytical category. As a corrective to these problems, we compare variation in global interest group mobilization across countries to the size of these countries' national economies. Relying on an original dataset mapping interest groups communities at the World Trade Organization (1997–2012) and the United Nations Climate Summits (1997–2011), we show that (i) global interest representation almost perfectly reflects differences in countries' relative economic power and (ii) contrary to the conventional wisdom, wealthier countries are, relative to their economic size, actually underrepresented in global interest communities.

This paper analyses the presence of interest organizations in political news in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands between 1990 and 2017. Previous research on organized interests in the media revealed (1) a consistent overrepresentation of business interests across countries, but (2) also that this overrepresentation has decreased over time in a European context. However, these studies are snapshots of interest group patterns with either cross-country or longitudinal variation, and important players such as corporations have been largely excluded by European scholars. We argue that including corporations affects previous conclusions as it reveals substantial differences across countries and an increasing role of business interests in the news. We use a data set of Dutch and British news articles, in which we identified 34,657 interest organizations. This endeavor highlights that the distribution of organized interests in the media is skewed toward business interests and has not become more diverse. This suggests that the important insider role of business interests translates to outsider venues, which tells us something about how the news media maintain these patterns through the construction of news stories. These findings interfere with ideas of representativeness and flourishing democracies with a diverse public debate in which many different voices are expressed.