Sharing ties and preferences: Stakeholders’ position alignments in the European Commission’s open consultations

Abstract

What explains interest groups’ position alignments in the European Commission’s open consultations? The article argues that formal membership ties facilitate organisational coordination and the creation of lobbying coalitions among interest groups, which in turn affects their position alignments. This argument is supported by empirical evidence from five environmental consultations. Sharing a formal membership tie within an over-arching organisational structure has a stronger effect on position alignment than the fact of representing the same type of interest or having the same organisational form. Coordinated, coalition-based lobbying accounts to a significant extent for stakeholders’ position alignments in the EU open consultations. The ‘social’ embeddedness of lobbying has a direct effect on the advocacy strategies interest groups decide to employ during the early stages of EU policymaking.

Keywords

Coordinated lobbying European Commission membership ties open consultations position alignments

Introduction

When participating in the European Commission’s open consultations, interest groups express their support for different policy outcomes and align themselves along different sides of the policy debate. Consultations therefore usually entail the formation of lobbying sides, broadly defined as groups of organisations that share the same policy objectives and express similar policy positions (Klüver, 2011: 487). The conditions under which interest groups’ position alignments (lobbying sides) emerge are generally complex: organisations ‘may or may not be working together as part of a coalition’, although ‘[t]ypically, [ … ], most of the members of a given side do indeed coordinate their efforts informally or through formal coalitions’ (Baumgartner et al., 2009: 277). Coincidence may also play a role in the emergence of position alignments: organisations sometimes articulate identical positions by chance (Barry, 1980). These different sources of interest groups’ position alignments remain currently unexamined in the literature on European Union (EU) lobbying. To address this gap, the present article asks the following: what explains interest groups’ position alignments in the European Commission’s open consultations?

I answer this question by arguing that position alignments are a result of coordination among interest groups that are linked by formal membership ties in the same over-arching organisational structures. I contend that membership ties facilitate organisational coordination and the creation of lobbying coalitions, and that this in turn explains position alignments in the context of EC consultations. The observable implication is that interest groups sharing a membership tie express identical positions across issues within a consultation. To investigate this, I examine whether in a specific consultation there is a systematic pattern of organisations sharing a tie and articulating identical positions across issues. The number of organisations displaying this pattern indicates the extent to which position alignments are explained by coordinated lobbying efforts (coalitions). The analysis controls for interest type and organisational form as proxy measures for sources of identical positions in the absence of coordination (coincidence). The analysis is conducted on five EC environmental consultations. The findings show that formal membership ties play a key role in determining position alignments and the formation of lobbying sides: organisations sharing a membership tie are more likely to voice identical positions. Sharing a tie has a stronger effect on position alignments than the fact of representing the same type of interest or having the same organisational form. This shows that coordinated lobbying accounts to a significant extent for the observed position alignments and that membership ties facilitate this coordination. Lobbying context and the ‘social’ embeddedness of lobbying matter and they have a direct effect on stakeholders’ position alignments early on in the EU policymaking.

The relevance of understanding stakeholders’ position alignments in EC consultations is threefold. First, consultations are a common policy practice (Quittkat, 2011) and it is important to understand how interest organisations strategically approach them, and whether and how they coordinate their lobbying strategies in the context of this increasingly popular lobbying venue. Second, this topic provides interesting insights into how organisations try to affect the structuring of policy debates and the distribution of positions on the EU policy space by coordinating the submission of their policy position documents. Third, examining position alignments in relation to membership ties addresses an important debate in the literature about the role played by European-level associations in a system in which organisations seem to increasingly prefer direct lobbying over collective action (Coen, 1997) and about the effectiveness and efficiency of Euro groups in assuring interest representation (McLaughin and Jordan, 1993).

This article contributes to the scholarship on EU lobbying coalitions by providing one of the few systematic theoretical explanations and empirical analyses exploring coalition behaviour during the early stages of EU policymaking. Despite their prevalence in the EU policymaking, position alignments, lobbying coalition formation and the relationship between the two are topics that remain seriously under-researched. The few existing studies examine the impact of lobbying sides on lobbying success (Klüver, 2013) or the decision to join lobbying coalitions (Mahoney, 2007; Pijnenburg, 1998). They allow only limited insights into lobbying behaviour during the policy formulation and consultation stage, despite these being key lobbying stages. This article illustrates how organisational ties affect position alignments and shows ‘who works with whom’ (Salisbury et al., 1987) in Brussels. The article also contributes to the emergent literature on lobbying in EU consultations. Current research identifies determinants of lobbying success (Klüver, 2011), examines the variation in the number of demands expressed by organisations (Bunea, 2014) and their participation patterns (Rasmussen and Alexandrova, 2012; Rasmussen and Caroll, 2014). The scholarship agrees that organisations do employ this venue strategically (Quittkat and Kotzian, 2011). Yet, a systematic analysis of what explains position alignments, and whether organisations strategically coordinate their lobbying in this respect, is still missing.

The article also contributes to the general literature on lobbying coalitions. It proposes a strategy to ‘identify the source of similarity’ in lobbying behaviour and answers Mizruchi’s call for empirically embedded research to identify these sources: ‘[t]he extent to which common interests and common behavior correspond is an empirical question’; therefore sources of similarity in preferences should be examined empirically and not assumed to be based on the similarity of interests (Mizruchi, 1990: 24). The article illustrates how the well-established US tradition of studying lobbying behaviour based on the analysis of inter-organisational ties and policy positions (Carpenter et al., 2004; Laumann and Knoke, 1987) can be applied to researching other, non-American, lobbying contexts.

Membership ties, lobbying coordination and position alignments in EU open consultations

I argue that position alignments (lobbying sides) emerge as a result of two aspects: (1) coordinated lobbying efforts on behalf of interest groups (lobbying coalitions) and (2) coincidence of positions in the absence of coordination. Lobbying coalitions represent thus the more ‘formalised’ sub-parts of lobbying sides and the aim of this analysis is to assess the extent to which interest groups’ position alignments in EC open consultations are explained by coordinated lobbying. Coordination of lobbying efforts among coalition members can be formal or informal depending on the nature of interactions and the origin of ties linking organisational actors.

A classic argument in the scholarship is that the lobbying context affects interest groups’ lobbying behaviour (Baumgartner and Leech, 1998). Lobbying context affects therefore the manner in which interest organisations articulate, coordinate and align their policy positions within a lobbying venue. A key dimension of this lobbying context is ‘the inter-organisational context, the ties that bind interest organisations to each other’ (Beyers and Brau, 2013: 2). These ties explain how organisations seek and gain access to policymakers and to lobbying venues (Beyers and Brau, 2013) and how they exchange information with each other and with policymakers in pursuit of their lobbying goals (Beyers and Donas, 2014; Chalmers, 2013; Beyers and Kerremans, 2004).

Building on the US scholarship on lobbying coalitions (Hula, 1999; Mizruchi, 1993), this article argues that the inter-organisational environment in which organisations lobby and articulate their policy positions also plays a key role in explaining interest groups’ position alignments. Formal membership inter-organisational linkages are particularly relevant in this respect. These linkages facilitate inter-organisational coordination of lobbying behaviour, which leads in turn to organisations expressing closely aligned positions. Formal membership ties facilitate ‘repeated interactions and low information costs’, which are ‘important for developing a co-ordinated lobbying strategy, and for enforcing that strategy’ (Sabatier, 1998: 115). Within the EU, common, formal membership within a hierarchical, potentially coordinating structure such as a Euro-federation or a national association of the considered organisations is particularly relevant in this respect: this structure offers a consistent platform for communication, exchange of information and coordination of lobbying efforts among member organisations. Formal membership ties increase the likelihood of interest groups’ coordination of lobbying and expressed positions because they reduce the costs of collective action while increasing its benefits. These ties make communication exchanges easier and increase the amount of mutual trust among organisational members, while decreasing the risk of defection or free riding due to subsequent reputational costs. The scholarship on US lobbying provides further justification for using the formal membership of organisations within a hierarchical structure to explain lobbying coordination and the subsequent position alignments:

[i]f organizations are structurally or institutionally linked to one another, they do not face great challenges in ‘finding’ one another (the first information problem of coordination), and there is a lower cost of discovering their preferences (the second information problem of coordination) (Hula, 1999: 55).

Formal membership ties foster lobbying coordination and are therefore an explanatory factor for the position alignments resulting from this coordination. To evaluate the role of coordination in the formation of position alignments, we can examine within a consultation the systematic pattern of organisations sharing a membership tie and expressing identical policy positions across issues discussed in that consultation. The extent to which organisations share a formal tie and express identical positions gives an indication of the extent to which coordination explains position alignments in EC open consultations. To examine this, the research looks at interest groups dyads within consultations and tests the following hypothesis:

H1: Interest organisations sharing a formal membership inter-organisational tie are more likely to articulate identical policy positions than organisations not sharing a tie.

In statistical terms, this implies examining the probability that two organisations sharing a tie express identical positions. If two organisations sharing a formal membership tie are found to present a significantly higher probability of stating identical positions than two organisations not sharing a tie, then this attests that membership ties play a role in the structuring of position alignments and policy debates. The number of interest organisations found to share both a tie and an identical position is an indicator of the extent of organisational coordination within consultations and of the extent to which this coordination contributes to the formation of position alignments.

This argument specifies the role of formal ties and lobbying coordination in determining position alignments. It does not account though for the role of informal coordination in the formation of lobbying sides. This was also indicated above as a source of position alignments, along with formal coordination and random chance. This limitation in the theoretical and empirical scope of the present research is justified in three ways: first, recent research on EU lobbying networks shows that formal ties are a consistent predictor of informal ones (Beyers and Donas, 2014). This suggests in turn that it is reasonable to expect that by observing formal ties, this research also captures a fair amount of the existing informal inter-organisational linkages. Second, informal ties are difficult to measure. In the context of this article, an option to address this challenge would have been to survey organisations with respect to the linkages they had during the time of the analysed consultations. However, the results would have been most probably unsatisfactory due to the risk of being affected by informant bias because of the distance in time of the consultations, staff turnover and low response rates which are usually symptomatic for interest groups’ research based on survey data. As such, the exclusive theoretical focus on formal ties and coordinated lobbying efforts only is reasonable, while the subsequent methodological trade-off made by the present research gives a better estimate of inter-organisational linkages than the available alternatives. Third, exploring the effect of formal ties on coordination and position alignments in EC open consultations is interesting in and by itself and provides relevant insights into the role played by the logic of membership (Schmitter and Streeck, 1999) in the context of EU lobbying.

As mentioned earlier, position alignments can also be the consequence of coincidence: organisations express identical positions not because they coordinate in coalitions but because they share the same beliefs and lobbying goals by virtue of their structural characteristics. Organisations that represent the same type of interests (e.g. business, environmental, etc.) should in principle have similar policy objectives and so are more likely to express identical positions in the absence of coordination. Similarly, sharing the same organisational form (Euro group, national association, individual firm) could also increase the probability that two organisations articulate identical positions in the absence of coordination by virtue of representing the same type of ‘encompassing interests’ (Bouwen, 2002), such as European or national level interests. Therefore, interest type and organisational form are used as a proxy measure for the amount of coincidence that explains position alignments. Both are used as control variables in the empirical analysis.

Research design

The empirical test of this theoretical argument has two key components: identifying the inter-organisational ties linking organisations participating in individual consultations and identifying the positions expressed by organisations in relation to the issues on which the Commission consulted stakeholders.¹ This test is conducted on an original dataset identifying this information for five EC open consultations in the environmental policy. For each organisation participating in the consultation, the dataset records with which other organisations in the consultation it has a formal membership linkage and whether it shares the position expressed by each of these organisations on individual issues. Information on each organisation’s interest type and organisational form was also coded.

The unit of analysis is interest group dyads combined with issues.² In the statistical analysis, the dependent variable (Same position) is dichotomous, taking a value of 1 when the two organisations in the dyad expressed an identical position on one issue, and a value of zero otherwise.

Case selection

The analysis focuses on environmental consultations. The environment is a core EU policy area, characterised by important current developments, in which the EU has clear competences and interest groups play a significant role in the design of policies. Environmental measures usually entail ‘concentrated costs’ for specific sectors of society (mostly business), and ‘diffuse benefits’ that are widely distributed across all segments of society. This results in a lobbying/policymaking environment characterised by ‘interest groups politics’ (Wilson, 1980: 370), in which different interests compete for policy influence and in which lobbying sides are likely to emerge. All these make Directorate General Environment one of the most lobbied in the Commission (Coen, 2009). This policy area is therefore characterised by the presence of relatively large numbers of organisations, which are different in both interests represented and organisational form. This assures variation in terms of interests represented and position alignments.³

The article examines the following consultations on: setting emission performance standards for new passenger cars (2007); including aviation activities in the scheme for greenhouse gas emission allowance trading (2005); monitoring, reporting and verification mechanisms for aviation emissions included in the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) (2008); the proposal for a Waste Framework Directive (2003); and revising the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (2008). All received media coverage in EU news portals, tackled main topics of EU environmental policy (i.e. air pollution, waste management), involved a variety of organisations and focused on both technical and more political/publicly controversial issues. They all represent key policy events in the development of the EU environmental policy.

Identifying inter-organisational ties

For each consultation, the study identified formal membership ties linking organisations at the time of the consultation. To identify this, a criterion for establishing what counts as a tie was established: formal membership within the same European or national association was the criterion for individual organisations. If two groups were full or associate members of a national or European-level association, the research identified a formal tie between them. Whether the national or European association is part of the consultation community is not important: the key aspect is that both groups have the quality of being a full/associate member of a more encompassing structure that creates the premises for a constant communication flow, an easy to reach communication forum and formal and informal contacts on a permanent basis. A similar logic applies to national associations’ membership in EU peak associations. For those national or European associations whose formal members are also participants in the consultation, a tie is recorded for these organisations with each of its members. Information on membership was estimated for the year when the consultation was conducted. Data were collected based on the analysis of groups’ websites, yearly activity reports and direct email inquiries. The inter-organisational ties were recorded in a matrix format as undirected, symmetric ties.⁴

This strategy has the advantage of capturing formal, ‘coordinated, public linkages’ between actors (Box-Steffensmeier and Christenson, 2010). It allows for the capture of what Beyers argues to be a key dimension of the EU interest groups system: ‘[ … ] an actor’s overall network choice is affected by a latent and stable continuum, which is formed independently of the particular issue in which the actor happens to be involved’ (Beyers, 2002: 601). In addition, this strategy addresses any endogeneity concerns related to two terms of the proposed hypothesis tested in the large-n analysis: the formal membership ties were established prior in time to the articulation of positions in the considered consultations and therefore the direction of the relationship between the two is univocal.

Identifying policy positions

Interest groups’ positions were identified based on an attentive content analysis of the position documents submitted to the Commission during consultations and of their answers to the online questionnaire the EC used as an alternative consultation tool.⁵ The decision to analyse formal written submissions has a strong justification in the literature, which emphasises the high levels of institutionalisation of the dialogue between EU policymakers and interest groups (Greenwood, 2007: 347). In addition, such documents constitute an important data source in the well-established American literature focusing on interest groups’ formal interactions with bureaucracies and participation in rule making (McKay and Yackee Webb, 2007; Yackee Webb, 2006), and more recently in the study of lobbying coalitions (Nelson and Yackee Webb, 2012). A policy position refers here to a group’s formally expressed demand or support for a certain policy outcome. The literature conventionally refers to this as an observed policy position or the expressed/revealed preference of a political actor (Benoit and Laver, 2006: 11–34).

A policy issue is a discrete policy problem on which the Commission explicitly asks for stakeholders’ policy feedback.⁶ For each consultation, the research identified policy issues based on the formal EC call for a consultation and interest groups’ consultation documents.⁷ I analyse groups’ positions articulated in relation to 107 issues corresponding to five proposals. Table 1 presents the number of issues and organisations identified per proposal.

Table 1.

Number of interest organisations and policy issues per consultation.

Consultation	CO₂ emissions	Aviation	MRV aviation	Waste	WEEE
No. of issues	10	6	51	15	25
No. of organisations	45	184	37	138	164

Examining empirically the role of organisational ties in explaining position alignments

A multi-level statistical analysis is conducted to test the aforementioned hypothesis and to explain position alignments in the EC open consultations. As a reminder: the unit of analysis is interest group dyads combined with issues. The dependent variable (Same position) is dichotomous, taking a value of 1 when the two organisations in the dyad expressed an identical position on one issue and a value of zero otherwise. The main explanatory variable (Organisational tie) is also dichotomous and takes a value of 1 if the two organisations in the dyad share a membership tie, and zero otherwise.

The regression models are presented in Table 2. Model 4 is the main statistical model and tests the effect of sharing a formal membership tie on the probability of expressing the same position.⁸ Two control variables are used in the analysis: interest type and organisational form. The Same interest type variable is dichotomous and indicates whether the two organisations represent the same interests. The Same organisational form variable is also dichotomous, providing information on whether the two organisations in the dyad have the same organisational form.⁹ Models 1–3 test the individual effect of each of these three variables on the probability of expressing identical positions. The results in Table 2 show that all three variables are statistically significant. Yet, the value of the coefficient of the Organisational tie variable is higher than those of the two control variables. In addition, the log-likelihood of Model 1 is higher than the log-likelihoods of Models 2 and 3, which indicates that the explanatory power of the Organisational tie variable is stronger than that of the two control variables.

Table 2.

Mixed effects logit models explaining position similarity.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4
Fixed effects
(Intercept)	1.12** (0.43)	1.14*** (0.18)	1.21*** (0.26)	0.96*** (0.28)
Organisational tie	1.41*** (0.03)			1.21*** (0.03)
Same interest type		0.51*** (0.01)		0.27*** (0.01)
Same organisational form			0.36*** (0.01)	0.27*** (0.01)
Random effects
Policy issue (s.d)	1.57	1.47	1.47	1.25
Model fit
Log-likelihood	−100,583	−101,634	−102,013	−100,067
N	168,698 (dyads)	168,698 (dyads)	168,698 (dyads)	168,698 (dyads)
Policy issues	107	107	107	107

p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

Multi-level random intercept logit models with maximum likelihood estimates.

Standard errors in parentheses. Proposal fixed effects are included in the models but are not reported here.

Table 3 uses the estimates of Model 4 and shows that the predicted probability that two organisations express the same position when they do not share an organisational tie is 0.49. When the two organisations share a membership tie, the predicted probability is 0.76. The first difference, measuring the effect of change from a situation in which the organisational tie is absent to one in which the tie is present, is substantial and marks an increase in the probability of articulating an identical position by 0.27 or by 55% (CI: 29.6%; 92.7%).

Table 3.

Predicted probabilities of identical policy positions.

	Model 4
	Variable = 0	Variable = 1	Percentage change
Organisational tie	0.49 (0.30; 0.68)	0.76 (0.61; 0.88)	55.0% (29.6%; 92.7%)
Same interest type	0.42 (0.27; 0.61)	0.49 (0.30; 0.68)	15.2% (9.8%; 22.0%)
Same organisational form	0.49 (0.30; 0.67)	0.56 (0.36; 0.74)	13.8% (8.3%; 19.8%)

Note: 95% confidence intervals provided in parentheses.

The effect is much stronger than that of the variable indicating whether the two organisations represent the same interest type. The first difference measuring the effect of the Same interest type variable shows a statistically significant but smaller effect on the probability of two organisations expressing an identical position: the effect suggests an increase of 0.07 (15.2%) in this probability when two organisations represent the same type of interest. As a robustness check, the statistical model was run on several random samples of different sizes derived from the original dataset. The results indicated an effect of the same strength of the Organisational tie variable on position similarity.

The presence of an inter-organisational tie is thus found to be strongly and positively associated with the articulation of identical positions across issues and consultations. These results show that alignment of positions is more likely to result from sharing formal membership within an association than from the fact that two organisations represent the same interests and should have in principle the same positions. The results show that membership is indeed important in facilitating coordination (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1999: 115) and that such a coordination plays a greater role in determining the alignment of interest groups’ expressed positions in consultations than the fact of representing the same type of interests. This emphasises the importance of lobbying coordination as a constitutive and explanatory dimension of position alignments in the EU open consultations.

Across analysed consultations, almost 54% of interest groups have at least one organisational tie. This indicates that the lobbying behaviour of more than half of the organisations participating in the examined consultations is described by coordination of lobbying efforts when submitting their policy position documents. In this respect, coordination through formal membership ties appears to be a rather widespread and consistent behaviour, and thus accounts to a significant extent for the position alignments observed within the five consultations.

However, only 13.6% of interest groups–issue dyads on which groups expressed an identical position correspond to a situation in which the two organisations in the dyad also shared a membership tie. This indicates that while inter-organisational ties and coordination of lobbying efforts are a relevant explanatory factor for position alignments in the context of EC open consultations, similarity of positions can also be attributed to a certain extent either to random chance or potentially to unobserved (informal) inter-organisational ties. This suggests that while coordination of lobbying efforts takes place within EC open consultations (and this is facilitated by formal membership ties) and that coordination contributes to the emergence of position alignments, coincidence still plays a role in explaining the emergence of lobbying sides. This provides further justification for empirical examinations (such as the present one) of the sources of position alignments in the context of the EC consultations.

In substantive terms, these results show that, at least in the environmental policy, interest groups do coordinate their lobbying as early as the public consultation stage of the EU policymaking process. Figure 1 exemplifies this. It illustrates the two main lobbying coalitions articulated in the consultation on the reduction of CO₂ emissions for passenger cars: a coalition of environmental NGOs, consisting of prominent European-level organisations such as Transport and Environment, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund and several other national level or individual NGOs, such as Friends of the Earth UK and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; and a coalition of organisations representing the European car manufacturers, formed by the European Association of Automobile Manufacturers and national level associations from the UK (the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Ltd.), Germany (Verband der Automobilindustrie e.V), the Netherlands (RAI Association) and Spain (Asociacion Espanola de Fabricantes de Automoviles y Camiones). Two smaller coalitions represented the interests of the rubber manufacturing industry (the European Tire and Rubber Manufacturers’ Association; and Michelin) and the industry of electric vehicles (Asociacion per la Divulgacio de les Tecnologies Sostenibles; the European Association for Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles; and the Spanish Association for the promotion of Electric and non-contaminant Vehicles). Some other organisations decided to lobby on their own, as indicated by the list of organisational isolates on the left-hand side of Figure 1. These were interest groups with no inter-organisational membership ties to the other stakeholders in the consultation. The full names and abbreviations of all organisations identified in this consultation are available in the online appendix.

This structuring of the inter-organisational environment describes, in this case, a consultation process dominated by two main lobbying sides representing opposing interests. Figure 2 illustrates the aggregate distribution of interest groups’ positions across issues, for the same public consultation, and shows a rather polarised policy space: seven of the 10 issues discussed present a polarised distribution of expressed policy positions. This illustrates in more specific terms how coordination of lobbying efforts and the formation of lobbying coalitions in open consultations has a direct and relevant effect on the structuring of the policy space as described by the aggregate distribution of positions they articulate on the issues discussed in consultations (position alignments).

This finding is important because it provides relevant insights into the structuring of the EU interest intermediation system during the early stages of policymaking: it illustrates patterns of fragmentation and polarisation of interest representation based on the examination of lobbying coordination and coalition patterns. The level of coordination among interest groups when lobbying is considered to be a core dimension in evaluating a system of interest representation (see a relevant discussion of this in Schneider et al., 2007: 447–448). In addition, the relationship between the polarisation of the inter-organisational environment and the underlying polarisation of interests and positions is considered to be a key element in understanding policy dynamics:

a policy domain’s opposition network has important implications for the resolution of domain policy conflicts. Polarised structures indicate bitter divisions whose great gulfs cannot be easily bridged, because few or no members exist in common that could serve as mediators of disputes. More diffuse configurations indicate a system’s greater capacity to bargain and negotiate a compromise solution to an event conflict (Knoke et al., 1996: 23).

Therefore, interest groups’ choice for a coordinated, coalition-based lobbying strategy when submitting their position documents has direct implications on how diverse interests get represented, on the level of conflict over policy issues and policy events, and can facilitate or impede the resolution of such conflicts and the progress of the policymaking process. Read together, Figures 1 and 2 illustrate this well: the consultation on reducing the CO₂ emissions of passenger cars was characterised by high levels of conflict over policy outcomes. On one side, the coalition of environmental organisations asked for tougher measures aimed at reducing emissions, while the group of organisations representing car manufacturers pleaded for a more relaxed regulatory regime. The polarised inter-organisational environment resulted in divided position alignments across the issues discussed in the consultation and created a highly debated policy event between these two lobbying sides.

Conclusions

This article examined the sources of interest groups’ position alignments in the context of EC open consultations. I developed and tested empirically a theoretical framework that explains position alignments as a result of coordinated, coalition-based lobbying facilitated by formal membership ties. I argued that formal membership ties play a key role in facilitating lobbying coordination, coalition formation and the emergence of position alignments or lobbying sides. The empirics supported this explanation: within the examined consultations, sharing a membership tie is a stronger predictor of expressing identical positions across issues than the fact of representing the same interest type. This provides evidence that membership within over-arching organisational structures does facilitate lobbying coordination within EU consultations, and that a theoretical framework developed in the context of American lobbying (Hula, 1999; Sabatier, 1998) also holds in the EU context. Furthermore, it demonstrates that in these consultations, organisations act strategically and lobby in coalitions. This explains the alignment of their positions. More than half of the analysed organisations were found to engage in coordinated lobbying. This indicates that a significant part of organisations participate in consultations following a logic of membership that guides their collective action and accounts to a large extent for the emergence of lobbying sides. Organisations know that EU policymakers are interested in the aggregate support different policy alternatives get on behalf of stakeholders. With each and every individual submission the aggregate distribution of positions on one issue looks different and has an increased probability to be translated into outcomes (Skodvin et al., 2010). In some cases however, position alignment is not associated with the presence of an organisational tie. This indicates that coincidence (or possibly unobserved informal organisational links) also plays a role in explaining position alignment and the formation of lobbying sides at EU level.

Moreover, these findings indicate that membership within European associations facilitates EU lobbying coordination. This contributes to the debate about the challenges faced by European-level associations in terms of interest representation and preference aggregation at EU level (Michalowitz, 2004). On the one hand, European associations are in a strong position to represent interests at the supranational level because of their encompassing membership, broad legitimacy and status of ‘preferred partners’ of dialogue for EU officials (Bouwen, 2002). On the other hand, their diverse membership can potentially ‘diminish the ability for collective action and constrain the forming of common positions on different policy issues’ (Beyers, 2008: 1201), which points to a structural weakness of Euro groups. This article contributes to the discussion of different conditions under which European associations matter (Beyers, 2008) by showing how they can play a significant role in facilitating the coordination of position taking and lobbying strategies during the initial stages of EU policymaking.

To advance our understanding of the formation dynamics and patterns of interest groups’ position alignments in EU policymaking, future research could refine the theoretical framework I proposed by including as an explanatory variable the role played by policymakers and their policy preferences on lobbying strategies and position alignments. The literature on counter-active lobbying indicates that groups’ lobbying strategies and decisions about whom and how to lobby are directly affected by what they assume or know to be the policy preferences/positions of decision makers (Austen-Smith and Wright, 1992, 1994). Future research could estimate the preferences of EC decision makers across issues and investigate in what way and to what extent EU lobbying is driven by the logic of ‘strategic transmission of information’ from stakeholders to decision makers, and to what extent EU organisations engage in counteractive lobbying in the context of open consultations. Another interesting line of research is to investigate how the structure of stakeholders’ position alignments in open consultations influence the positions taken by the Commission in the legislative bargaining processes taking place in the Council of the EU.¹⁰ Future studies could also extend the research design to examine other policy areas and consultations. This would increase the explanatory power of the theoretical framework and the generalisability of empirical results. The design could also be developed in a manner allowing for the capture of informal cooperation linkages among organisations. This would allow the empirical examination of the emergence of lobbying coalitions between ‘strange bedfellows’ (Mazey and Richardson, 2005) and of informal coalitions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jan Beyers, Raimondas Ibenskas, Gerald Schneider, Robert Thomson and the anonymous referees for their excellent comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

References

Austen-Smith

Wright

(1992) Competitive lobbying for a legislator’s vote. Social Choice and Welfare 9: 229–257.

Austen-Smith

Wright

(1994) Counteractive lobbying. American Journal of Political Science 38: 25–44.

Barry

(1980) Is it better to be powerful or lucky? Part 1. Political Studies 28: 183–194.

Baumgartner

Berry

Hojnacki

(2009) Lobbying and Policy Change. Who Wins, Who Loses and Why, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Baumgartner

Leech

(1998) The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Benoit

Laver

(2006) Party Policy in Modern Democracies, London and New York: Routledge.

Beyers

(2002) Gaining and seeking access: The European adaptation of domestic interest associations. European Journal of Political Research 41: 585–612.

Beyers

(2008) Policy issues, organizational format and the political strategies of interest organizations. West European Politics 31: 1188–1211.

Beyers

Brau

(2013) Ties that count: Explaining interest groups’ access to policymakers. Journal of Public Policy 34: 93–121.

10.

Beyers J and Donas T (2014) Inter-regional networks in Brussels: Analyzing the information exchange among regional offices. European Union Politics 15(4) 547–571. Available at: DOI: 10.1177/1465116514536269 (accessed 31 October 2014).

11.

Beyers

Kerremans

(2004) Bureaucrats, politicians, and societal interests: How is European policy-making politicized? Comparative Political Studies 37: 1119–1150.

12.

Bouwen

(2002) Corporate lobbying in the European Union: The logic of Access. Journal of European Public Policy 993: 365–390.

13.

Box-Steffensmeier JM and Christenson DP (2010) Invaluable involvement: Purposive interest group networks in the 21^st century. In: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, 22–25 April 2010. Available at: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=ErrW_poAAAAJ&citation_for_view=ErrW_poAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC (accessed 6 October 2014).

14.

Bunea

(2014) Explaining interest groups’ articulation of policy preferences in the European Commission’s open consultations: An analysis of the environmental policy area. Journal of Common Market Studies 52(6): 1224–1241.

15.

Carpenter

Esterling

Lazer

(2004) Friends, brokers and transitivity: Who informs whom in Washington politics? Journal of Politics 66: 224–246.

16.

Chalmers

(2013) With a lot of help from their friends: Explaining the social logic of informational lobbying in the European Union. European Union Politics 14: 475–496.

17.

Coen

(1997) The evolution of the large firm as a political actor in the European Union. Journal of European Public Policy 4: 91–108.

18.

Coen

(2009) Business lobbying in the European Union. In: Coen

Richardson

(eds) Lobbying the European Union: Institutions, Actors and Issues, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 145–168.

19.

Greenwood

(2007) Interest Representation in the European Union, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

20.

Heclo

(1987) Issue networks and the executive government. In: King

(ed.) The New American Political System, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Research Institute for Public Policy Research, pp. 87–124.

21.

Hula

(1999) Lobbying Together: Interest Groups Coalitions in Legislative Politics, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

22.

Klüver

(2009) Measuring interest group influence using quantitative text analysis. European Union Politics 10: 535–549.

23.

Klüver

(2011) The contextual nature of lobbying: Explaining lobbying success in the European Union. European Union Politics 12: 483–506.

24.

Klüver

(2013) Lobbying as a collective enterprise: Winners and losers of policy formulation in the European Union. Journal of European Public Policy 20: 59–76.

25.

Knoke

Pappi

Broadbent

(1996) Comparing Policy Networks: Labor Politics in the US, Germany and Japan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26.

Laumann

Knoke

(1987) The Organizational State, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

27.

McKay

Yackee Webb

(2007) Interest group competition on federal agency rules. American Political Research 35: 336–357.

28.

McLaughlin

Jordan

(1993) The rationality of lobbying in Europe: Why are Euro-groups so numerous and so weak? Some evidence from the car industry. In: Mazey

Richardson

(eds) Lobbying in the European Community, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 122–161.

29.

Mahoney

(2007) Networking vs. allying: The decisions of interest groups to join coalitions in the US and the EU. Journal of European Public Policy 14: 366–383.

30.

Mazey

Richardson

(2005) Environmental Groups and the European Community: Challenges and Opportunities. In: Jordan

(ed.) Environmental Policy in the European Union. Actors, Institutions and Processes, 2nd ed. London: Earthscan, pp. 106–121.

31.

Michalowitz

(2004) Lobbying as a two way strategy: Interest intermediation or mutual instrumentalisation. In: Warntjen

Wonka

(eds) Governance in Europe: The Role of Interest Groups, Baden Baden: Nomos, pp. 75–92.

32.

Mizruchi

(1990) Cohesion, structural equivalence, and similarity of behavior: An approach to the study of corporate political power. Sociological Theory 8: 16–32.

33.

Mizruchi

(1993) Cohesion, equivalence, and similarity of behavior: A theoretical and empirical assessment. Social Networks 15: 275–307.

34.

Mizruchi

König

(1991) Size, concentration and corporate networks: Determinants of business collective action. Social Science Quarterly 72: 299–313.

35.

Nelson

Yackee Webb

(2012) Lobbying coalitions and government policy change: An analysis of federal rulemaking. Journal of Politics 74: 339–553.

36.

Pijnenburg

(1998) EU lobbying by ad hoc coalitions: An exploratory case study. Journal of European Public Policy 5: 303–321.

37.

Quittkat

(2011) The European Commission’s online consultations: A success story? Journal of Common Market Studies 49: 653–674.

38.

Quittkat

Kotzian

(2011) Lobbying via consultation: Territorial and functional interests in the Commission’s consultation regime. Journal of European Integration 33: 401–418.

39.

Rasmussen

Alexandrova

(2012) Foreign interests lobbying Brussels: Participation of non-EU members in Commission consultations. Journal of Common Market Studies 50: 614–631.

40.

Rasmussen

Caroll

(2014) Determinants of upper-class dominance in the heavenly chorus: Lessons from European Union online consultations. British Journal of Political Science 44: 445–459.

41.

Sabatier

(1998) The advocacy coalition framework: Revisions and relevance for Europe. Journal of European Public Policy 5: 98–130.

42.

Sabatier

Jenkins-Smith

(1999) The advocacy coalition framework: An assessment. In: Sabatier

(ed.) Theories of the Policy Process, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 117–168.

43.

Salisbury

Heinz

Laumann

(1987) Who works with whom? American Political Science Review 81: 1217–1234.

44.

Schmitter PC and Streeck W (1999) The organisation of business interests: Studying the associative action of business in advanced industrial societies. MPIfG Discussion Paper 99/1. Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Available at: http://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp99-1.pdf (accessed 6 October 2014).

45.

Schneider

Finke

Baltz

(2007) With a little help from the state: Interest intermediation in the domestic pre-negotiations of EU legislation. Journal of European Public Policy 14(3): 444–459.

46.

Skodvin

Gullberg

Aakre

(2010) Target-group influence and political feasibility: The case of climate policy design in Europe. Journal of European Public Policy 17: 854–873.

47.

Wilson

(1980) The politics of regulation. In: Wilson

(ed.) The Politics of Regulation, New York: Basic Books Inc. Publishers, pp. 357–394.

48.

Yackee Webb

(2006) Assessing inter-institutional attention to and influence on government regulations. British Journal of Political Science 36: 723–744.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.14 MB

0.00 MB