Abstract
This article analyzes the formation of lobbying coalitions in European Union legislative politics. Specifically, we investigate whether interest organizations establish coalitions and under which conditions business interests and non-business interests join a coalition. Our explanatory framework emphasizes three factors that drive coalition formation: the influence-seeking needs of interest groups, the need to ensure organizational maintenance, and policy-related contextual factors. To test our hypotheses, we analyze 72 policies initiated by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010 and 143 semi-structured interviews with representatives of European interest organizations. Our results demonstrate that non-governmental organizations that depend relatively less on membership support are strongly inclined to engage in coalitions. Moreover, the heterogeneous coalitions we identified—consisting of both business and non-business interests—are usually situated in policy areas that enjoy considerable salience among the broader public and emerge on issues that receive substantial media visibility.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
