| Faulty assumptions about the nature of interest group activity have misled scholars' assessments of interest group influence in the European Union (EU). The influence literature portrays interest groups as commonly using undue pressure and purchase tactics in order to change the minds of decision-makers. However, this work on influence has yet to take seriously insights from the rest of the interest group literature, which has long established that interest groups are much more likely to lobby decision-makers who already share their views (friends) rather than to attempt to change the minds of those who do not (foes). Moreover, in lobbying friends, interest groups are best understood as informational service bureaus, providing policy-relevant information to decision-makers in exchange for legitimate access to the policy-making process. This dissertation brings these insights to bear on interest group influence in the EU. I conceive of interest group influence as a function of an interest group's ability to efficiently and reliably provide policy-relevant information to EU decision-makers. To this end, I examine the information processing capacity -- how interest groups gather, filter, make sense of, generate and transmit information -- of EU interest groups within a comparative framework. I find that, in general, interest group influence in the EU is balanced with no particular set of groups dominating the EU policy-making process at the expense of others. |
