"Service bureaux of decision-makers or successful spin-doctors: Assessing interest group influence in the EU and the US"

Michalowitz, Irina. (2005) "Service bureaux of decision-makers or successful spin-doctors: Assessing interest group influence in the EU and the US". In: UNSPECIFIED, Austin, Texas. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

It is generally held amongst scholars of interest intermediation that interest groups are quite influential for policy-making. This has been demonstrated in studies of the national level and features very strongly in studies of US lobbying. It is also evident in the fact that interest group activities at the European level have been studied in great detail and are considered an important element of the EU’s system of multilevel governance. In the context of these studies, recent research by the author has come to a surprising result: in six case studies of day-to-day EU policy-making in the transport and IT sectors, private actors and interest groups could only influence the smaller details of legislation. In addition, they were only influential when the general political will of the decision-makers was either in support of their demands or indifferent to them. These findings lead to the question of what determines the success of interest groups, especially in light of the fact that studies of US lobbying come to very different results. Why is interest representation in the US so influential when it seems that at the EU-level this is not quite the case? This paper compares findings on the influence of US lobbying with that of the EU-level and discusses what this means for democratic governance and the relationship of decision-makers to societal groups.

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