LOW NUMBER OF ENTITIES LOBBYING THE EU EXPLAINS LOW LOBBYING OUTCOME

LOW NUMBER OF ENTITIES LOBBYING THE EU

The following Member States have low number of entities lobbying the EU. Entities may be  Academic Institutions; Associations & Network of Public Authorities; Companies & Groups, Law Firms; NGOs; Organizations representing Churches and Religious Communities, Other Organizations Public or Mixed entities; Professional Consultancies; Self-employed Individuals; Think Tanks and Research Organizations; Trade & Business Associations; Trade Unions and Professional Associations

Entities (as of 30/08/2024)

1. Estonia: 65
2. Bulgaria: 57
3. Croatia: 57
4. Slovenia: 56
5. Slovakia: 53
6. Malta: 38
7. Latvia: 30
8. Cyprus: 26
9. Lithuania: 5

Lobbying influence

The objective of interest groups and states as lobbyists is to influence political decisions. Lobbyists engage in lobbying decision-makers in order to achieve policy outcomes that are close to their ideal points. However, not all interest groups or states are successful in their lobbying attempts. Whereas some lobbyists manage to feed their ideas into the policy process, others fail to have an impact on the design of legislation.

Lobbying is a complex collective process: on any given policy issue, a multitude of interest groups are trying to shift the policy output towards their ideal point. Hence, interest groups are not lobbying individually, they are lobbying together in lobbying coalitions. This holds true also for states as lobbyists.

Engaging in lobbying activities is always costly and requires the investment of resources. In order to lobby institutional actors in the EU, Member States need to know exactly what they want to achieve in a given negotiation. This requires domestic co-ordination capacitie, e.g. a smoothly operating ministerial bureaucracy and a high quality of policy formulation. Member States also need financial resources to employ experts and sufficient number of negotiators with enough time for gathering expertise and maintaining contacts with stakeholders to work on negotiation positions and to do the actual lobbying. Admittedly, with small resources the outlook for lobbying success is limited.

The activity of lobbying is not equally costly to all Member States and in all policy areas. The more contacts a Member State already has to EU institutional actors, the less transaction costs are required to lobby on a new issue. Member States need to invest in manpower and time to establish contacts, before they can be used to disseminate policy ideas, preferences and background materials. In addition, Member States with many contacts to the EC, the EP, the Council Presidency and other Member States can lobby on several fronts at a time with greater ease and without investing many additional resources. The longer a Member State has been member of the EU, the more time delegations have had to become acquainted with people within the EC, EP and the Council (Presidency). The more seats a Member State has in the EP, the less costly it becomes to lobby the EP. This is due to the fact that Member States often have closer contacts with ‘their’ MEPs than with MEPs of other nationalities. The number of nationals working in different DGs of the EC can also influence transaction costs.

The degree of conflict over an issue strongly affects the ability of interest groups to lobby policy making successfully. If the majority of interest groups shares the same policy goal, it should be relatively easy for an interest group to be successful in its lobbying attempts because all actors are pushing the legislator in the same direction. However, if a policy is characterized by a high degree of conflict, actors with opposing policy preferences are trying to push decision-makers in different directions, which makes lobbying success unlikely. Hence, the higher the degree of conflict over an issue, the more opposing interest groups lobby decision-makers and thus the harder it is to shift the policy output in one particular direction.

The frequency of lobbying is positive for successful outcomes of lobbying. The more you lobby, the more you learn about the system and how to navigate in the corridors of the EU.

It is of great importance to form a broad coalition of interests with other Member States  and various interest groups, and to target all EU institutions to achieve success in lobbying. Such norm advocacy is particularly important for small Member States.