LOBBYING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: INTEREST GROUPS, LOBBYING COALITIONS AND POLICY CHANGE
| Author | Joost Berkhout |
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12231 |
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
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LOBBYING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: INTEREST GROUPS, LOBBYING COALI-
TIONS AND POLICY CHANGE
Heike Klüver
Oxford University Press, 2013, 320 pp., £63.00 (hb), ISBN: 978-0-19-965744-5
For a long time, interest group studies have focused on the strategies of lobby groups,
and not their inuence on actual public policy decisions. Interest group inuence on
decision-making was considered either too difcult to isolate from the inuence of other
actors, or not particularly relevant considering the more important, but even more elusive,
control of powerful groups over the political agenda.
Heike Klüver’s study of interest group inuence on policy decisions is important for
several reasons. First, most studies of lobbying simply assume that lobbyists are successful
in shaping public policy. However, we need an empirical justication for this assumption
and a specication of the circumstances that are conducive to lobbying success. Second,
students of public policy benet from a more developed notion of interest group inuence
in order to explain more precisely why policies sometimes change and at other times not.
Last, the broader public benets from a clearer understanding of the inuence of lobbyists.
Do lobbyists really push policies in the direction of the interestsof a ‘fraction of a minority’?
The book is part of an increasing number of relatively formal, large-nstudies into interest
group politics. Studies of interest groups traditionally rely on country-specic case studies
of certain policy elds, economic sectors, or groups. Such studies sometimes include broad
theoretical frameworks, such as pluralism or corporatism, but tend to remain relatively
descriptive and case-specic in nature. This contrasts with Klüver’s study that relies on
a modest, middle range theoretical framework, a research design that uses quantitative
research methods and aspires to infer causal relationships.
Klüver aims to explain why some lobby coalitions consistently see the EU policy
process move in their preferred direction whereas others seem to lose in EU policy
decision-making. She departs from the idea that interest groups and policy-makers
engage in a mutually benecial exchange relationship. Coalitions of lobbyists provide
information, the support of citizen-members and ‘economic power’ to ofcials of the
European Commission in exchange for policy decisions that are relatively close to the
preferences of the lobbyists. This exchange relationship is mediated by the characteristics
of the issues lobbied, most notably their salience, their complexity and the applicable
institutional voting rule. Klüver’s focus on lobbying coalitions rather than individual
lobby groups is innovative. A coalition includes all groups at one side of the European
Commission on a unidimensional scale related to a given policy proposal. This is an
empirically and theoretically sensible approach. It would be practically impossible to
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (276–284)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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