Lobbying in the European Union

Heike Klüver, before going to Konstanz, was working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science and International Relations and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She received her PhD from the University of Mannheim and her research focuses on interest groups, political parties, and legislative politics in Europe. She is Junior Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz.

Klüver sets a new standard methodologically by using state-of-the-art computer-assisted content analysis techniques to map the effect of interventions by interest groups on policy proposals in the European Union. Moving beyond previous approaches, she is able to ask familiar questions (can interest groups affect the policy process, and under what conditions?) but to answer them on a much larger scale because she makes use of large stores of documentary evidence to assess change in European Commission regulations from their initial proposal through the policy process to final formulation. She can then statistically assess which groups see the proposals move more in the direction they prefer. The work is therefore a tour-de-force of research methodology, setting new ground that future scholars will not be able to ignore.

• Introduction ; 1. Lobbying in Coalitions ; 2. How to Measure Interest Group Influence ; 3. Mapping European Union lobbying ; 4. Policy Debates, Interest Groups, and the Structure of Conflict ; 5. The Policy Formulation Stage: Interest Groups and the European Commission ; 6. The Decision-Making Stage: Bringing the Council and the European Parliament in ; 7. Conclusions and Implications: Interest Groups, European Politics, and Democracy ; Bibliography ; Appendix 1: Association Questionnaire ; Appendix 2: Company Questionnaire