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The Density of the EU Interest System: A Test of the ESA Model

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2010

Abstract

To evaluate calls for a more theoretically generalizable, large-N study of EU interest representation, we adapt the ESA model of interest system density, originally developed to study the interest communities of the American states, to the EU case. We necessarily modify both model and measures in order to account for the unique features of the EU policy process. We test the model with OLS regression using data on the density of different types or guilds (economic and social sectors) of organized interests in the European Union. We use the findings to discuss the viability of inter-system transfers of theories about the politics of interest representation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

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27 The CONECCS database, the European Commission’s former database of civil society groups and organizations, which was available at http://ec.europa.eu/civil_society/coneccs/ until March 2007, is sometimes used for this purpose, but, at least on its own, provides a very imperfect census of EU interest organizations (Berkhout and Lowery, ‘Counting Organized Interests’).

28 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’; Gray and Lowery, Population Ecology.

29 Leech, Beth, Baumgartner, Frank, La Pira, Timothy and Semanko, Nicholas, ‘Drawing Lobbyists to Washington: Government Activity and the Demand for Advocacy’, Political Research Quarterly, 58 (2005), 1930CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Broscheid and Coen, ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’.

31 Berkhout and Lowery, ‘Counting Organized Interests’.

32 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’; Gray and Lowery, Population Ecology; Gray, Virginia, Lowery, David, Fellowes, Michael and Anderson, Jennifer, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy: Understanding the Demand Side of Lobbying’, American Politics Research, 33 (2005), 404434CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’, p. 24.

34 They also found that interest system age and the overall size of government do not determine population size, and that interest organizations often die or leave the lobbying scene ( Lowery, and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’, p. 24Google Scholar). Another variable in the theoretical model is environmental stability. That is, when political systems collapse entirely, the interest population must begin growing anew. But this factor for both the US and EU cases is only of theoretical rather than empirical relevance.

35 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’.

36 Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

37 Lowery, and Gray, , ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’, pp. 10–12Google Scholar, 25; Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

38 Coen, ‘Empirical and Theoretical Studies’.

39 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’; Gray and Lowery, Population Ecology; Gray and Lowery, ‘Life in a Niche’; Nownes and Lipinski, ‘The Population Ecology of Interest Group Death’.

40 Nownes, ‘The Population Ecology of Interest Group Formation’; Nownes and Lipinski, ‘The Population Ecology of Interest Group Death’.

41 Lowery, David and Gray, Virginia, ‘Bias in the Heavenly Chorus: Interests in Society and Before Government’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 16 (2004), 530CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowery, Gray and Fellowes, ‘Sisyphus Meets the Borg’.

42 Gray and Lowery, ‘Reconceptualizing PAC Formation’; Gray and Lowery, ‘To Lobby Alone or in a Flock’.

43 Gray, Virginia, Lowery, David and Godwin, Erik, ‘Public Preferences and Organized Interests in Health Policy: State Pharmacy Assistance Programs as Innovations’, Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, 32 (2007), 89129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Broscheid and Coen, ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’.

45 Butt Philip, Alan, ‘Pressure Groups in the European Community’ in UACES Occasional Papers 2 (London: University Association for Contemporary European Studies, 1985)Google Scholar; Greenwood, Interest Representation; Mazey, and Richardson, , ‘Interest Groups and EU Policy-making’, pp. 254–255Google Scholar.

46 Greenwood, Interest Representation; Greenwood, Justin and Young, Alisdair, ‘EU Interest Representation or US-Style Lobbying?’ in Nicolas Jabko and Craig Parsons, eds, The State of the European Union: With US or Against US? European Trends in American Perspective (Oxford: European Studies Association/Oxford University Press, 2005), Vol. 7, pp. 275295CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coen, ‘The Evolution of the Large Firm’; Broscheid and Coen, ‘Insider and Outsider Lobbying’.

47 Much the same is true when we turn to the related topic of interest-system bias or diversity. The American and European literatures certainly agree on one key aspect of interest populations: at state and federal governments in the United States and in the EU, the representation of economic interests far outweighs more diffuse interests, such as human rights or the environment, in terms of numbers and perhaps influence as well (Salisbury, ‘Dominance of Institutions’; Schlozman and Tierney, Organized Interests; Lowery, David and Gray, Virginia, ‘The Dominance of Institutions in Interest Representation: A Test of Seven Explanations’, American Journal of Political Science, 42 (1998), 231255CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowery, David and Gray, Virginia, ‘Representational Concentration and Interest Community Size: A Population Ecology Interpretation’, Political Research Quarterly, 51 (1998), 919944CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baumgartner, Frank and Leech, Beth, ‘Interest Niches and Policy Bandwagons: Patterns of Interest Group Involvement in National Politics’, Journal of Politics, 63 (2001), 11911213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowery, Gray and Fellowes, ‘Sisyphus Meets the Borg’; Greenwood, Interest Representation; Pollack, ‘Representing Diffuse Interests’; Coen, ‘The Evolution of the Large Firm’; Mahoney, ‘The Power of Institutions’).

48 Woll, , ‘Lobbying in the European Union’, p. 457Google Scholar.

49 Leech, Baumgartner, La Pira and Semanko, ‘Drawing Lobbyists to Washington’.

50 Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

51 Lowery, and Gray, , ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’, pp. 10–11Google Scholar; Nownes and Lipinski, ‘The Population Ecology of Interest Group Death’.

52 Siaroff, Alan, ‘Corporatism in 24 Industrial Democracies: Meaning and Measurement’, European Journal of Political Research, 36 (1999), 175205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Eising, Rainer, ‘The Access of Business Interests to EU Institutions: Towards Elite Pluralism?’ Journal of European Public Policy, 14 (2007), 384403CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmidt, Vivien A., Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Nownes, ‘The Population Ecology of Interest Group Formation’; Nownes and Lipinski, ‘The Population Ecology of Interest Group Death’.

55 Interestingly, some European scholars (making no reference to the population ecology approach) have hypothesized that the growth of EU interest organizations will soon slow because most of the significant interests in Europe have now formed a Euro-association ( Mazey, and Richardson, , ‘Interest Groups and EU Policy-making’, p. 255Google Scholar).

56 Clearly, other reasons may still well justify such adoption, however.

57 Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

58 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’; Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

59 Eising, , ‘Interest groups in European Union policy-making’, pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

60 Baumgartner, ‘EU Lobbying: A View from the US’.

61 Mahoney, , Brussels vs the Beltway, p. 13Google Scholar.

62 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’.

63 Mahoney, , Brussels vs the Beltway, p. 25Google Scholar.

64 Greenwood, Interest Representation; Broscheid and Coen, ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’.

65 Lowery, Gray, Fellowes and Anderson found that when a US state government adopts a more expansive legislative agenda, this tends to promote the immediate registration of interest organizations ( Lowery, David, Gray, Virginia, Fellowes, Michael and Anderson, Jennifer, ‘Living in the Moment: Lags, Leads, and the Link between Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’, Social Science Quarterly, 85 (2004), 463477CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Thus, registrations were found to be contemporaneous with the legislative cycle, rather than anticipating future agendas (that is, leading them) or responding to previous-year agendas (that is, lagging behind them). To explore this in the EU context, both the legislative activity and policy uncertainty variables will be measured not only for 2005, to assess the contemporaneous theory, but also for 2004 and 2006, to assess the leading and lagging theories.

66 Mahoney, ‘The Power of Institutions’; Mazey and Richardson, ‘Interest Groups and EU Policy-making’; Broscheid and Coen, ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’.

67 Bouwen, ‘Corporate Lobbying in the European Union’; Bouwen, ‘Exchanging Access Goods for Access’; Mazey and Richardson, ‘Interest Groups and EU Policy-making’, pp. 250–1; Broscheid and Coen, ‘Insider and Outsider Lobbying’; Beyers, , ‘Voice and Access’, p. 219Google Scholar.

68 Greenwood, and Young, , ‘EU Interest Representation or US-Style Lobbying?’ p. 279Google Scholar.

69 Broscheid and Coen, ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’.

70 Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

71 In contrast to Broscheid and Coen, we do not propose to use the lists of policy areas provided by the European Commission to define guilds (Broscheid and Coen, ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’). First, these policy areas are broad and give us too low an N to assess causal relationships from statistical analysis. Secondly, there is no appropriate indicator available for guild size to match each policy area and thereby test the ESA theory in the European context.

72 See NACE Rev. 1.1 at: http://www.fifoost.org/database/nace/nace-en_2002c.php, accessed 03-07.

73 Wessels, Bernard, ‘Organizing Capacity of Societies and Modernity’, in Jan W. van Deth, ed., Private Groups and Public Life: Social Participation, Voluntary Associations and Political Involvement in Representative Democracies (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 198219Google Scholar; Balme, Richard and Chabanet, Didier, European Governance and Democracy, Power and Protest in the EU, Governance in Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), pp. 4550Google Scholar.

74 This classification is available in Questions V39–53 of the World Values Survey Questionnaire 1999–2001, which asks: ‘Please look carefully at the following list of voluntary organizations and activities and say … which if any do you belong to?’ The list includes: social welfare services; religious or church organizations; education, arts, music or cultural activities; labour unions; political parties or groups; local community action; Third World development or human rights; conservation, environment, animal rights groups; professional associations; youth work; sport or recreation; women’s groups; peace movement; voluntary organizations concerned with health; other. World Values Survey Questionnaire 1999–2001 is at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ (accessed November 2007).

75 Berkhout and Lowery, ‘Counting Organized Interests’.

76 As discussed in fn. 27 above, the CONNECS database was available at http://ec.europa.eu/civil_society/coneccs/ until March 2007. The site was closed for updating and revision as part of the EC’s Transparency Initiative: http://ec.europa.eu/civil_society/coneccs/index.html (accessed May 2008). Since June 2008, CONECCS has been replaced by the ‘Register of Interest Representatives’.

77 The EP online directory is available at http://www.europarl.eu.int/lobby.

78 Eurostat, , European Business Facts and Figures: Data 1995–2005 (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2006)Google Scholar.

79 For various reasons: inadequate information in the sample; inadequate corresponding Eurostat data; or inadequate corresponding data for the other independent variables. More information is available from the authors.

80 Eising, Rainer, ‘Multilevel Governance and Business Interests in the European Union’, Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, 17 (2004), 211245CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eising, ‘The Access of Business Interests’.

81 See fn. 74 above for the specific questions asked of respondents, and the answer options available to them.

82 The World Values Survey 2000 excluded Cyprus. See: www.worldvaluessurvey.org (accessed November 2007).

83 The EU-24 population (excluding Cyprus) was 450.7 million in 2001: Eurostat, Europe in Figures: Eurostat Yearbook 2006–2007 (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Union, 2007).

84 Gray and Lowery, Population Ecology.

85 Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

86 See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm and http://eur-lex.europa.eu/RECH_menu.do?ihmlang=en (accessed February 2008). All legislative and preparatory acts in EUR-Lex are assigned classification codes according to a four-tier subject classification, and EUR-Lex provides an online classification-based search function to access them. The first (aggregate) tier contains 20 classification codes, but altogether the first, second, third and fourth tiers contain more than 400 codes.

87 In most cases, this involved codes at the third or fourth tier because of their level of detail.

88 For example, the Environment and Animal Rights guild had four applicable codes: 03.50.30 Animal health and zootechnics; 11.30.60 Multilateral co-operation for the protection of the environment, wild fauna and flora and natural resources; 15.10 Environment; 15.40 Protection of animals.

89 For example, all wood-based industries were allocated code 03.30.60 Forests and forestry.

90 Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’.

91 Mahoney, ‘The Power of Institutions’.

92 The bodies, members and schedules were listed in CONECCS until March 2007.

93 For example, the Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee ‘Agriculture’ was relevant to all agricultural guilds, whereas the Consultative Group ‘Alcoholic Beverages’ was only relevant to the making of beverages.

94 The CONECCS list of Consultative Bodies has been criticized for not being sufficiently comprehensive. Broscheid and Coen, who also investigated the density of the EU interest population in 2005, opted instead to use the EU’s Register of Expert Groups ( Broscheid, and Coen, , ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’, p. 358Google Scholar). This Register commenced in November 2005 and lists formal and informal advisory bodies established either by EC decisions or informally by the EC services (see Gornitzka, Ase and Sverdrup, Ulf, ‘Who Consults? Expert Groups in the European Union’, West European Politics, 31 (2008), 725750CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Although the Register is more comprehensive than CONECCS, because it includes the EC’s informal advisory bodies from November 2005, we chose CONECCS as a more suitable indicator for this research. The Register includes three sets of groups (experts, stakeholders and joint expert/stakeholder groups), and expert groups do not include organized interests. Instead, these groups are comprised ‘solely of government experts/national officials’. The Register cannot be searched by group category to filter out expert groups. Thus, it taps government and interest organization activity in particular policy areas, but may provide skewed results on the question of interest organization participation in these policy-making arenas. Also, the Register started in November 2005, two months before the end of the first year of analysis reported here, whereas CONECCS held data current for the calendar years of 2004, 2005 and 2006, enabling us to reliably tap formal policy participation opportunities for the full period of study.

95 European Commission Communication COM (2002) 704, ‘General principles and minimum standards for consultation of interested parties by the Commission’, chap. II, ‘Overall rationale of the Commission’s consultation process’.

96 A consultation may simply query stakeholders about the impact of a policy (e.g., the 2008 Enterprise and Industry public consultation, which was an online questionnaire for European businesses, seeking suggestions about reducing the administrative burdens put on businesses by the EU (see: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/newsroom/cf/newsbytheme.cfm?displayType=consultation accessed May 2008). Alternatively, a consultation may lead to the drafting or revision of a legislative proposal such as a White or Green Paper. The 2006 Audiovisual Industry consultation sought comments on the White Paper, ‘A European Communication Policy’. A 2005 Employment and Social Affairs consultation sought input on the Green Paper, ‘Confronting Demographic Change: A New Solidarity between the Generations’. See: http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/consultations/index_en.htmclosed (accessed January 2008).

98 Balme, Richard and Chabanet, Didier, ‘Introduction: Action collective et gouvernance de l'Union européenne’, in R. Balme, D. Chabanet and V. Wright, eds, L'Action collective en Europe/Collective Action in Europe (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2002), pp. 21108Google Scholar, at pp. 45–7; Wessels, Bernard, ‘Contestation Potential of Interest Groups in the European Union: Emergence, Structure, and Political Alliances’, in G. Marks and M. R. Steenbergen, eds, European Integration and Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 198219Google Scholar, at pp. 203–4.

99 Gray, Lowery, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’; Lowery, Gray, Fellowes and Anderson, ‘Living in the Moment’.

100 Wessels, ‘Contestation Potential of Interest Groups’.

101 Unlike the other two measures, the value of consultative bodies was constant across the three years.

102 However, this was not especially a problem with the energy variables per se. The three energy variables were not closely related to each other, which also made it impossible to combine them in an index. Rather, the collinearity results from our effort to include a relatively few social guilds in our model via a complex set of interaction terms and a polynomial specification.

103 We do not, of course, wish to suggest that the ‘social’ or ‘non-economic’ organizations do not have economic interests. Indeed, trade unions are largely concerned about economic issues. Rather, this distinction refers to the bases of their support as measured by the supply variables in the model.

104 Greenwood, Justin, ‘Organized Civil Society and Democratic Legitimacy in the European Union’, British Journal of Political Science, 37 (2007), 333357CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 342.

105 Broscheid, and Coen, , ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’, p. 105Google Scholar.

106 Maloney, William A. and Rossteutscher, Sigrid, ‘The Associational Universe in Europe’, in William A. Maloney and Sigrid Rossteutscher, eds, Social Capital and Associations in European Democracies: A Comparative Analysis (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 3978Google Scholar.

107 Olson, The Logic of Collective Action.

108 For example, in the US case, states with more potential supporters of a strong environmental policy would be expected to have more environmental interest organizations. And across states, those with more potential supporters of a strong education policy would be expected to have more education interest organizations. But because there is more widespread support in the US for education policy than for strong environmental policy, it could well be the case that there are fewer of the latter across all of the states than the former. Thus, democratic responsiveness would not require educational groups to be as active as environmental groups to achieve the same effect.

109 It is also possible that these differences might arise because the European Union has only more recently extended its policy brief to social issues. We do not find this plausible, given the marked difference between our results and our original expectations.

110 Mahoney, ‘The Power of Institutions’; Eising, ‘The Access of Business Interests’.

111 Gray, Virginia, Lowery, David and Godwin, Erik, ‘Public Preferences and Organized Interests in Health Policy: State Pharmacy Assistance Programs as Innovations’, Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, 32 (2007), p. 89129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Broscheid and Coen, ‘Lobbying Activity and Fora Creation’; Mahoney, Brussels vs the Beltway.

113 Mahoney, , Brussels vs the Beltway, pp. 17–27Google Scholar.

114 Berry, Jeffrey M., The New Liberalism: The Rising Power of Citizen Groups (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1999)Google Scholar.