Who’s in and who’s out?: Explaining access to policymakers in Belgium

In most political systems, the community of policy insiders represents a small subset of the total interest group population. Therefore, one key question is which factors explain why some mobilized interests become insiders and others remain outsiders. By contrasting a bottom-up registration of interest groups with a top-down census of all groups that enjoy access to policymakers, we present a unique approach to distinguish insiders from outsiders. This approach allows us to systematically analyze which factors-such as resources, constituency, scale of organization and policy portfolio-predict who becomes a policy insider. Our analysis focuses on interest group politics in Belgium, and shows that next to resources, the size of the membership, the scale of organization and a group's policy portfolio are strong predictors of the likelihood to gain access

When politics makes strange bedfellows: Why do NGOs and business interests coalesce in EU legislative politics?

Much interest group literature uses organization types, often the distinction between business and non-business interests, as key categories and often expects these categories to correspond with key policy conflicts. Being an NGO or a business interest then affects mobilization patterns, strategies and influence. This paper takes a somewhat different perspective and analyzes when and why business interests and NGOs are part of the same lobbying coalition. To answer this question we emphasize three explanatory factors: the logic of influence, organizational maintenance and contextual factors. To test our hypotheses we start from a sample of 125 legislative proposals submitted by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010 and a set of 143 semi-structured interviews with EU-level interest organizations. Our findings demonstrate that groups which depend less on members’ donations or oppose a legislative proposal tabled by the European Commission are much more prone to engage in business-NGO alliances. Moreover, salient proposals are more likely to stimulate coalition building in general

Conceptualizing and Measuring the Political Salience of EU Legislative Processes

Salience, which can be broadly understood as the importance actors attribute to a political matter, is a key concept in political science. It has been shown to affect diverse matters such as the behaviour of interest groups and decision-makers in concrete policymaking processes as well as citizen attitudes and their voting behaviour. However, quite regularly salience is differently conceptualized and operationalized within and between different political science subfields, which raises questions of theoretical (non-) complementarity and conceptual boundaries as well as of measurement validity. In this paper we review how salience is conceptualized and measured in studies on public opinion, interest groups, political communication and EU legislative policy-making. Empirically, we probe the (non-) complementarity of different conceptualizations with original data on EU legislative policymaking. To do so, we draw on datasets developed in a large project on EU interest group politics (INTEREURO). For a sample of 125 legislative processes initiated by the European Commission (between 2008 and 2010) we combine evidence on salience collected through in-depth analyses of five media-outlets and interviews with 70 Commission experts as well as with 143 interest group representatives

Birds of a feather flock together: why EU party and interest group alignments reflect the left-right political cleavage

The role of lobbying in the EU legislative process has been the subject of numerous studies, but to what extent do party political lines affect the nature of the relationship between interest groups and parties in the European Parliament? As Jan Beyers, Iskander De Bruycker and Inger Baller write, there is generally an expectation that business groups are more likely to align with right-wing parties, whereas NGOs campaigning for broader societal goals will more frequently align with parties on the left of the political spectrum. By analysing the context of EU legislative lobbying in relation to 54 legislative acts they demonstrate that this expectation largely holds true, particularly for the most controversial pieces of legislation

International institutions and interest mobilization : the WTO and lobbying in EU and US trade policy

Published online in February 2016What affects lobbying patterns in trade policymaking? Existing explanations focus mainly on economic determinants, like the rise of intra-industry trade. We argue that the international trade institutions of the World Wade Organization (WTO) themselves are also key for understanding which type of interest mobilization is likely to arise. We contend that the institutional setting of issue-linkage based trade negotiations creates incentives for firms to work through broad sector-wide lobbying organizations, while judicial adjudication and enforcement in WTO dispute settlement stimulates de-linkage, leading to product-specffic interest mobilization. We illustrate how these two arguments can explain the coexistence of both sector-wide and product-specific lobbying in the contemporary international trade regime. We provide evidence on interest mobilization for United States (US) and European Union (EU) initiated WTO disputes, and on EU and US domestic interest organizations that mobilize during multilateral trade rounds or are present at WTO ministerial conferences

How Europe shapes the nature of the Belgian Federation. Differentiated EU impact triggers both cooperation and decentralization

Presentation on department page: http://www.uia.no/no/portaler/om_universitetet/oekonomi_og_samfunnsvitenskap/statsvitenskap_og_ledelsesfag/ forskning_isl/isl_working_papers_seriesAbstract. European integration triggers contrasting views from Belgian political elites. Proponents of con-federalism, further decentralization and separatism point to the decreasing importance of the central government level within a more integrated Europe as well as to the growing relevance of regions within contemporary Europe. Opponents of separatism generally favor a strong central government arguing that Europe will not easily accept separatism and that further decentralization may substantially weaken the European position of Belgium and its regions. This paper aims to clarify the European factor in the ‘Belgian Question’. Our argument consists of two parts. First, we discuss the political-administrative consequences of the institutional interpenetration of the Belgian federation within the EU polity. Second, we explore how European economic integration impacts upon politics within the Belgian federation. Our main conclusion is that both aspects of European integration entail a differentiated outcome; while the first triggers cooperation, the second stimulates ongoing decentralization pressures.

Systematic Review – Final: Does seeding after severe forest fires in western USA mitigate negative impacts on soils and plant communities

Broadcast seeding is one of the most widely used post-wildfire emergency response treatments intended to reduce soil erosion, increase vegetative ground cover, and minimize establishment and spread of non-native plant species. However, seeding treatments can also have negative effects such as competition with recovering native plant communities and inadvertent introduction of invasive species. With the last review occurring in 2004 there is a need to re-examine what is known about the effectiveness and ecological impacts of post-fire seeding specific to forested ecosystems across the western U.S

The scope and patterns of mobilization and conflict in EU interest group politics

The literature on interest group mobilization in EU legislative politics is heavily focused on organizations as much attention is concentrated on groups’ organizational characteristics, their activities towards different institutional venues, and their attempts to influence policies in one or a small set of policy cases. Yet, despite our growing knowledge about interest group politics, we know little about the pervasiveness of lobbying or the patterns of conflict and mobilization in EU interest group politics. How are conflict and mobilization in EU interest group politics structured? Can we speak of structural patterns of interest group conflict and mobilization or is the EU rather a balkanized lobbying arena? In order to analyze these questions we adopt a policy-centered account, instead of an organization-centered perspective, of interest group politics. More precisely, for a sample of 116 pieces of legislation we analyze the scope of interest group mobilization, the divisiveness of mobilization processes and the nature of conflict that is mobilized through the activities of lobbyists. For our empirical analyses, we triangulate evidence from different sources including media-analyses, interviews with 80 experts in the European Commission, interviews with 143 lobbyists and consultations. We conclude with a discussion of how our understanding of conflict structures complements policy field- and organization-based explanations of interest group politics

Zugang und Legitimität in der EU: vorläufige Ergebnisse der Befragung deutscher Interessenverbände, politischer Parteien, Ministerien und politischer Stiftungen zur Außenhandelspolitik in der Europäischen Union

"Dieser Bericht stellt erste Ergebnisse der deutschen Teilstudie des Forschungsprojekts 'Access and legitimacy' vor. Ausgehend von der wachsenden Bedeutung europäischer Politik untersucht dieses Projekt, wie Interessengruppen und soziale Bewegungen auf die EU-Politik im Allgemeinen und die EU-Handelspolitik im Besonderen reagieren. Der Bericht präsentiert Daten von insgesamt 113 strukturierten face-to-face Interviews mit Vertreterinnen und Vertretern deutscher Interessenorganisationen (Wirtschaftsverbände, Gewerkschaften und NGOs) sowie Vertreterinnen und Vertreter politischer Parteien, Ministerien und politischer Stiftungen in Deutschland. Wir konzentrieren uns auf die Meinungen, Einstellungen und Präferenzen der Akteure in der Handelspolitik und untersuchen die unterschiedlichen Formen politischer Aktivität, die zur Einflussnahme auf politische Entscheidungen verwendet werden. Die Daten zeigen, dass Europa für die deutschen Akteure insgesamt eine sehr große Rolle spielt und dass diese einen beachtlichen Teil ihrer Ressourcen zur Einflussnahme auf der EU-Ebene einsetzen. Gleichwohl wird der größte Anteil der Ressourcen für die politische Interessenvertretung auf nationaler Ebene verwendet. Bei der Frage, mit welchen Strategien Interessenorganisationen vorgehen, um Einfluss zu nehmen, kann auf die recht verbreitete Nutzung von Netzwerkstrategien verwiesen werden. Bei der Nutzung von Öffentlichkeitsstrategien lassen sich dagegen größere Unterschiede zwischen den Akteursgruppen festhalten. Schließlich zeigt diese erste Auswertung, dass eine der Hauptkonfliktlinien im Bereich der Handelspolitik zwischen der Forderung nach stärkerer wirtschaftlicher Liberalisierung und der Forderung nach besserem Schutz des Sozialstaates verläuft." (Autorenreferat)"This paper presents preliminary results on the German data that is part of the larger research project 'Access and Legitimacy'. Given the increasing significance of European policy-making, this project investigates how interest groups and social movements respond and adapt to EU-policies in general and trade policy in particular. The paper presents data generated in 113 structured, face-to-face interviews with representatives of German interest groups (economic associations, labour unions, and NGOs) as well as representatives of political parties, ministries, and political foundations in Germany. Our focus is on the ideas, attitudes and preferences of specific actors regarding trade policy, and we investigate the different forms of political action that actors employ in order to exert influence on policy outcomes. The data indicates that Europe has great influence on German actors and that a majority of these actors have invested resources in order to influence European policies directly at the EU-level. Nevertheless, actors tend to spend the lion's share of their resources at the national level. In terms of which strategies actors employ, the data shows that most actors to a large extent utilize network strategies, while a considerable difference with regard to the use of public strategies across different types of actors can be detected. Finally, our initial research findings show that one main cleavage in the trade domain exists between economic liberalism and welfare state protectionism." (author's abstract