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Key practitioners who work in and with EU business associations come together with leading policy makers from the EU institutions and research academics to analyse change factors for the associations and their role in EU policy making and implementation

Based on original research with 50 EU business associations and 150 of their members, this book assesses the effectiveness of EU business associations and their potential to bring value to the EU policy making process and to their members, and lends a methodology by which they can be evaluated

Interest representation plays a systemic role in EU policy making and integration, recognised as such in the Treaty on European Union. Interest organisations supply technical and political information to the EU institutions, and EU institutions use interest organisations as agents of political communication. Interest organisations act as a proxy for an otherwise largely absent civil society, with a teeming population of groups advocating for every imaginable cause. Where groups are absent, so EU institutions have stimulated their formation. The result is a pluralist system of checks and balances, although the literature includes findings of 'islands' resembling corporatist practice. EU institutions have designed a range of procedures in support of 'an open and structured dialogue between the Commission and special interest groups,' now largely packaged as a 'Better Regulation' programme. Measures include funding for NGOs, consultation procedures accompanied by impact assessments, a Transparency Register to provide lobbying transparency, and measures for access to documents that enable civil society organisations to keep EU institutions accountable. A multi-level governance system further strengthens pluralist design, making it impossible for any one type of interest to routinely capture the diversity of EU decision making. A key controversy in the literature is how to assess influence, and whether lobbying success varies across interest group type. EU public policy making is regulatory, making for competitive interest group politics, often between different branches of business whose interests are affected differently by regulatory proposals. There are striking findings from the literature, including that NGOs are more successful than business organisations in getting what they want from EU public policy making, particularly where issues reach the status of high salience where they attract the attention of the European Parliament. A key innovation of the Lisbon Treaty involves a European Citizens' Initiative, ...

"Interest Organizations and European Union Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.

NGOs play an institutionalised role in the European Union (EU), serving as unofficial opposition in a system otherwise orientated around consensus, and as policy partner to in times of need. Dialogue with institutions is structured along pluralist lines, but with pockets of quasi-corporatist practice, despite rejection of corporatist systems. A mature landscape of NGOs activity exists, with those founded at EU level self-organised into 'families' and network structures where professionalised social movement organisations rub shoulders with formal NGOs. Key debates involve the extent to which NGOs are instrumentalised by EU institutions, which stimulate group formation and fund NGOs, and the extent to which input legitimacy can be based around dialogue in the 'Brussels bubble'. EU institutions have opened up avenues of direct dialogue with citizens in pursuit of systemic input legitimacy, despite aspirations among some leading NGOs for this to be founded upon a 'civil dialogue' between themselves and EU institutions.

In defiance of accounts which see the European Union (EU) as structurally incompatible with democracy, the Lisbon Treaty set out the general right and specific means for citizens to participate in EU decision-making. Whilst the Treaty codified long-established practices of representative democracy and of dialogue with civil society organizations, it also notably introduced a new measure, the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI), commencing in 2012. The ECI has limited formal powers, with no ability to mandate political institutions. It is promoted by the European Commission as an agenda-setting and participatory democracy measure, rather than one of direct democracy. Nonetheless, it has an elevated status within one of the current European Commission's ten strategic priorities and is remarkable in a number of ways. First, it differs from the European Commission's established partnerships and dialogue with organized interests by focusing on direct forms of wider citizen participation. Second, it is the world's first transnational citizens' initiative, with aspirations to help build an EU-wide public sphere. These aspirations were assessed in a 2017 review of the measure, proposing the introduction of a number of reforms aimed at tackling limited impact to date. This article evaluates the impact of the ECI in its first 5 years and then discusses the proposed reforms in terms of their potential to increase public deliberation. It develops and appraises evaluative criteria that help to assess whether institutionalizing contention, even in ways highly critical of EU institutions, might enhance public deliberation and bring the EU closer to its citizens.

Since 1992, the European Commission has sought to build 'An Open and Structured Dialogue' with interest groups, and since 2001 a broader 'Dialogue with Civil Society'. A core feature of this dialogue involves instruments of transparency, and pluralism, with funding to ensure the presence of a wide range of voices. Consultation procedures provide for a 'marketplace of ideas' which simulate political competition and contestation, with a 'voice but not a vote', and which are supposed to provide for answerability by the European Commission for its policy choices. The European Commission also selects its allies to support its regulatory proposals, with NGOs frequent allies as well as firms and business sectors supporting higher standards. The EU's fragmented decision-making system helps to provide a naturally pluralist environment, although some recent research suggests that NGOs are more likely to be successful in securing their policy goals than business organizations. NGOs work mostly in coalitions, with the size of coalition a factor in lobbying success. The saliency of issues is another substantial feature of variation in lobbying success and where NGOs can raise the contention of issues they can bring wider participation in EU issues.