lreg-2008-4
Interest groups in EU policy-making
by: Rainer Eising
There is a plethora of studies on interest groups in the European
Union. While these studies have generated a wealth of insights, it
is not actually clear what they have accomplished. This Living
Review seeks to identify those areas of interest group studies in
which our knowledge is fairly consolidated and in which major
research gaps or major controversies can be noted. I argue that
these research gaps and controversies stem from both the empirical
variance in the interest group landscape and the theoretical
segmentation of EU interest group studies. These have been shaped by
influences from Comparative Politics, International Relations,
Policy Analysis, and Democratic Theory. I suggest that future
research should engage to a greater extent in cross-cutting
theoretical debates in order to overcome the pronounced demarcation
of research areas and in more rigorous theory testing than has
sometimes been the case. The article starts by discussing the
problem of conceptualizing interest groups before moving on to the
fissured theoretical landscape. Thereafter, major research themes
are discussed. First, I review the relation between EU institutions
and interest groups. Here, I look both into multilevel governance
and Europeanization studies that focus on the vertical interaction
and into analyses that stress the horizontal segmentation of the EU
system in different institutions and sectors. Second, I analyze core
themes of EU and comparative interest group studies, namely the
issue of collective action, the access of interest groups to
policy-makers and their influence on EU policymaking.