Economic rather than political forces shape the pattern of lobbying at the European level

One argument frequently deployed by proponents of European reform is that the EU is particularly vulnerable to large-scale lobbying by international corporation. But what forces shape the pattern of this lobbying? Joost Berkhout argues that researchers have put too strong an emphasis on ‘political’ rather than ‘economic’ explanations for the structure of the EU business lobby community

Chapter 8 Is the EU different?

The European Union interest group population is often characterised as being biased towards business and detached from its constituency base. Many scholars attribute this to institutional factors unique to the EU. Yet, assessing whether or not the EU is indeed unique in this regard requires a comparative research design. We compare the EU interest group population with those in four member states: France, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. We diff erentiate system, policy domain and organisational factors and examine their eff ects on interest group diversity. Our results show that the EU interest system is not more biased towards the representation of business interests than the other systems. Moreover, EU interest organisations are not more detached from their constituents than those in the studied countries. Everywhere, business interest associations seem to be better capable of representing their members’ interests than civil society groups. These fi ndings suggest that the EU is less of a sui generis system than commonly assumed and imply the need for more fi ne-grained analyses of interest group diversity

Efficient updating of node importance in dynamic real-life networks

The analysis of real-life networks, such as the internet, biometrical networks, and social networks, is challenged by the constantly changing structure of these networks. Typically, such networks consist of multiple weakly connected subcomponents and efficiently updating the importance of network nodes, as captured by the ergodic projector of a random walk on these networks, is a challenging task. In this paper, new approximations are introduced that allow to efficiently update the ergodic projector of Markov multi-chains. Properties such as convergence and error bounds for approximations are established. The numerical applicability is illustrated with a real-life social network example

Interest Groups in Multi-Level Contexts: European Integration as Cross-Cutting Issue in Party-Interest Group Contacts

Policy-specific actor-constellations consisting of party- and group-representatives commonly drive the effective establishment of new policy programmes or changes in existing policies. In the EU multi-level system, the creation of such constellations is complicated because it practically requires consensus on two dimensions: the European public policy at stake and the issue of European integration. This means that, for interest groups with interests in particular policy domains, and with limited interest in the actual issue of European integration, non-Eurosceptic parties must be their main ally in their policy battles. We hypothesise that interest groups with relevant European domain-specific interests will ally with non-Eurosceptic parties, whereas interest groups whose interests are hardly affected by the European policy process will have party-political allies across the full range of positions on European integration. We assess this argument on the basis of an elite-survey of interest group leaders and study group-party dyads in several European countries (i.e., Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia) in a large number of policy domains. Our dependent variable is the group-party dyad and the main independent variables are the European policy interests of the group and the level of Euroscepticism of the party. We broadly find support for our hypotheses. The findings of our study speak to the debate concerning the implications of the politicisation of European integration and, more specifically, the way in which party-political polarisation of Europe may divide domestic interest group systems and potentially drive group and party systems apart

Chapter 8 Is the EU different?

The European Union interest group population is often characterised as being biased towards business and detached from its constituency base. Many scholars attribute this to institutional factors unique to the EU. Yet, assessing whether or not the EU is indeed unique in this regard requires a comparative research design. We compare the EU interest group population with those in four member states: France, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. We diff erentiate system, policy domain and organisational factors and examine their eff ects on interest group diversity. Our results show that the EU interest system is not more biased towards the representation of business interests than the other systems. Moreover, EU interest organisations are not more detached from their constituents than those in the studied countries. Everywhere, business interest associations seem to be better capable of representing their members’ interests than civil society groups. These fi ndings suggest that the EU is less of a sui generis system than commonly assumed and imply the need for more fi ne-grained analyses of interest group diversity

Timing is Everything? Organized Interests and the Timing of Legislative Activity

Different perspectives on the role of organized interests in democratic politics imply somewhat different temporal sequences in the relationship between legislative activity and the influence activities of organized interests. Unfortunately, a lack of data has greatly limited any kind of detailed examination of this sequence. We address this problem by taking advantage of the temporally very precise data on lobbying activity provided by the door pass system of the European Parliament (Berkhout and Lowery 2011). After reviewing the several different perspectives on the timing of lobbying and legislative activity, we present the data used in our analysis and then use them to consider the larger issue of what our findings can tell us about the role of organized interests in democratic politics and, more importantly, our theories of organized interests in the policy process

From Data to Stochastic Modeling and Decision Making:What Can We Do Better?

In the past decades we have witnessed a paradigm-shift from scarcity of data to abundance of data. Big data and data analytics have fundamentally reshaped many areas including operations research. In this paper, we discuss how to integrate data with the model-based analysis in a controlled way. Specifically, we consider techniques to quantify input uncertainty and the decision making under input uncertainty. Numerical experiments demonstrate that different ways in decision making may lead to significantly different outcomes in a maintenance problem

Viral Lobbying

Pandemic policies have been the focus of fierce lobbying competition by different social and economic interests. The contributions in this book analyse patterns in and implications of this ‘viral lobbying’. Based on surveys and focus group interviews, the book provides novel evidence on the lobbying strategies used during the pandemic, as well as the resulting access to and lobbying influence on public policy

ESF-EMBO Symposium: Antiviral Applications of RNA Interference

ABSTRACT: The first ESF-EMBO symposium on applications of antiviral RNA interference (RNAi) was held in the spring of 2008 in Sant Feliu de Guixols at the Costa Brava in Spain. Some 60 participants from the field of RNAi and virology came together to present their latest findings on RNAi-virus interactions, as well as the progress in the development of RNAi-based antiviral therapeutics. One of the big topics concerned the role of RNAi in natural antiviral defence mechanisms in mammals. In addition, new solutions to improve the efficacy and safety of RNAi-based antiviral drugs were presented. The combined expertise of researchers studying RNAi in plants, insects and mammalian systems greatly stimulated the overall discussion. The meeting was funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO

Viral Lobbying

Pandemic policies have been the focus of fierce lobbying competition by different social and economic interests. The contributions in this book analyse patterns in and implications of this ‘viral lobbying’. Based on surveys and focus group interviews, the book provides novel evidence on the lobbying strategies used during the pandemic, as well as the resulting access to and lobbying influence on public policy