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

De Bruycker, Iskander and Beyers, Jan (2015) When politics makes strange bedfellows: Why do NGOs and business interests coalesce in EU legislative politics? [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

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.

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