Jean-Claude Juncker’s new European Commission is the most ‘politicised’ in the institution’s history

Jean-Claude Juncker’s new European Commission officially entered office on 1 November. Arndt Wonka and Holger Döring write on the political profile of the new Commissioners, noting that in line with the growing politicisation of the institution over recent decades, the 28 members include a record share of former prime ministers and deputy prime ministers. The percentage of Commissioners who have a partisan affiliation with their country’s current government, and the percentage who have previously gained ministerial experience in national politics, are also at record levels in comparison to previous Commissions

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

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

Patterns of Conflict and Mobilization: Mapping Interest Group Activity in EU Legislative Policymaking

Contemporary studies on interest group politics have mainly used single interest organizations as their central objects of study. This has led to a rich body of knowledge on the motivations of interest group mobilization, strategy development and even policy access and influence. The focus on single interest groups, however, has resulted in limited knowledge on aggregate patterns of interest groups’ activity. This article seeks to address this lacuna, by examining patterns of mobilization and conflict of interest groups’ activity in EU legislative policymaking. To do so, it adopts a unique policy-centred research design and an empirical assessment of policy mobilization for a sample of 125 EU legislative proposals based on extensive media coding as well as structured elite interviews. We find that levels of policy mobilization vary substantively across different legislative proposals and that political conflict between interest groups is remarkably low. This suggests that interest group conflict and mobilization contribute little to EU politicization and that in cases where interest groups voice opposing positions, conflicts do not occur between business and non-business groups. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of interest groups in EU legislative policymaking