Cooperation in networks: Political parties and interest groups in EU policy-making in Germany
| Author | Arndt Wonka,Sebastian Haunss |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1465116519873431 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Cooperation in networks:
Political parties and
interest groups in EU
policy-making
in Germany
Arndt Wonka
Institute of European Studies, University of Bremen,
Bremen, Germany
Sebastian Haunss
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy,
University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Abstract
Political actors cooperate with each other to share resources and to organize political
support. In this article, we describe and explain such cooperative behavior in European
Union policy-making by analyzing the information networks that parliamentarians of the
Bundestag entertain with other party politicians and with interest groups. First, we
describe whom parliamentarians cooperate with to receive policy information.
Subsequently, we identify different types of cooperation networks. Differences in the
structure of these networks point to a political division of labor inside political parties
which is driven by the need to organize political support in policy-making. Finally, we
test the explanatory power of individual attributes, institutional positions and (shared)
political interests to account for the structure of parliamentarians’ cooperation net-
works. While formal positions and party ideology generally shape parliamentarians’
cooperation, their relative importance varies across different types of networks. The
article contributes theoretically to informational theories of interest group politics and
to the literature on national legislators’ behavior in EU policy-making.
Corresponding author:
Arndt Wonka, Institute of European Studies, University of Bremen, Bibliothekstr. 1, D-28359 Bremen,
Germany.
Email: wonka@uni-bremen.de
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(1) 130–151
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1465116519873431
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Keywords
European Union, information, interest group, parliamentarian, political party
Introduction
Politics is a collaborative enterprise. Politicians cooperate with each other and with
interest groups to develop policy initiatives and to organize support for the
adoption of these policies. This cooperation takes place within single political
institutions and across institutions. While our knowledge on parliamentary
decision-making and on interest-group politics is extensive, surprisingly little is
known about party politicians’ cooperative information-seeking efforts. This
might result from the fact that studies on political parties focus on voting patterns
when analyzing party politicians’ policy relevant behavior (Sieberer, 2006), where-
as studies of cooperation inside and across parties are rare and mostly found in
policy research (Grossmann, 2014). In addition, research very often focusses on
single institutions, thus excluding cooperative behavior which reaches beyond
these institutions. The interest group literature, on the other hand, sees politicians
usually only at the receiving end of interest groups’ lobbying strategies and not as
active and selective agents who, based on their own ambitions and ideas, seek
information from specific actors (Hall and Deardorff, 2006).
Our analysis of German parliamentarians’ information seeking activities
regarding European Union (EU) policies and the cooperation networks resulting
from these takes a broader political and institutional perspective. We account for
parliamentarians’ interactions with other members of the Bundestag, both of their
own and other parties, and with their (parliamentary) party’s leadership. In addi-
tion, we will consider parliamentarians’ cross-institutional interactions with mem-
bers of the government. Accounting for the multilevel character of the EU polity,
we also consider parliamentarians’ supranational contacts to parliamentarians of
the European Parliament (EP) and their transnational cooperative efforts with
parliamentarians in other EU member states. Since interest groups are important
for parliamentarians’ work (Du
¨r and Matteo, 2013; Rasmussen, 2012; Rasmussen
and Lindeboom, 2013), we also investigate parliamentarians’ interactions with
different types of interest groups (business groups, labor unions and nongovern-
ment organizations (NGOs)) in Germany and other countries as well as at the
EU level.
The substance of the cooperation efforts investigated here are interactions ini-
tiated by German parliamentarians to obtain information on EU policies. We use
a broad concept of information which encompasses technical as well as political
information. The patterns identified below represent stable relationships of infor-
mation exchange. To identify the networks representative of parliamentarians’
information-seeking activities, we asked parliamentarians to mark those from a
given list of a diverse set of actors whom they often approach to receive
Wonka and Haunss 131
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