ABSTRACT
The political success of organized interests is widely considered to depend on their capacity to provide helpful information: lobbyists that can offer highquality information to policy-makers should be most successful in gaining access and shaping policy outcomes (Ainsworth 1993; Austen-Smith 1993; Lohmann 1993). At the same time, favourable context conditions, such as a policy community encompassing the policy-maker and lobbyist, are seen as a prerequisite for successful lobbying (Knoke et al. 1996; Marsh 1998; Vogel 1989). Interest groups that face policy-makers who are favourably predisposed to them will find it easier to exert influence (Marsh 1998; Marshall 2010; Richardson and Jordan 1979). Yet, to date, the relationship between informational factors and context conditions remains unclear. What is the relative importance of these two factors in interest group politics? And how, if at all,
do they interact in shaping the extent to which groups can achieve their desired policy outcomes? We argue that the ability to provide relevant information (i.e., information
that can help a policy-maker assess the likely consequences of a planned policy change) is the primary factor explaining how close legislative proposals are to the policy positions of lobbyists. However, we also contend that the effectiveness of lobbyists’ informational capacities is affected by the institutional context: the ability to offer relevant information may be ineffective if a group faces hostile political decision-makers. Facing friendly policy-makers, in turn, should help those interest groups that can offer relevant information. It is therefore important to analyse how the combination of information and context accounts for the ability of interest groups to shape policy formulation. To investigate this question we focus on the distance between the policy pos-
itions of organized interests and the European Commission at the policy formulation stage of the European Union (EU)’s legislative process. It is widely recognized that lobbyists are well advised to get involved before a policy gets to the stage of public controversy (Dunleavy 1991) or becomes subject to plenary parliamentary debates (Austen-Smith 1993; Schlozman and Tierney 1986), and ideally even before specific policy instruments and documents are formulated (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Bouwen 2009: 25-6). Indeed, the degree of positional proximity has major implications for the output of the European policy process: lobbyists who manage to shape policy early on find their preferences much better reflected in the resulting legislation (Du¨r et al. 2015). However, existing analyses of lobbying tend to focus on the decision-making stage of the policy process. Only recently have scholars begun to investigate systematically the role of organized interests at the policy formulation stage of the EU policy process (Bunea 2013; Klu¨ver 2013). In the following sections, we first develop a theoretical account of the role of
information and institutional context in early stage lobbying in the EU and derive hypotheses. We then introduce the data used for testing these hypotheses before proceeding to present our findings. These data capture lobbying on over 100 policy issues in the EU. We conclude by relating our results to the literatures on lobbying and on public policy-making in the EU.
