Overview
The European Union interest group population is often characterised as beingbiased towards business and detached from its constituency base. Many scholarsattribute this to institutional factors unique to the EU. Yet, assessing whether ornot the EU is indeed unique in this regard requires a comparative research design.We compare the EU interest group population with those in four member states:France, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. We diff erentiate system, policydomain and organisational factors and examine their eff ects on interest groupdiversity. Our results show that the EU interest system is not more biased towardsthe representation of business interests than the other systems. Moreover, EUinterest organisations are not more detached from their constituents than those inthe studied countries. Everywhere, business interest associations seem to be bettercapable of representing their members' interests than civil society groups. Thesefi ndings suggest that the EU is less of a sui generis system than commonly assumedand imply the need for more fi ne-grained analyses of interest group diversity.
- | Author: Joost Berkhout, Marcel Hanegraaff, Caelesta Braun
- | Publisher: Routledge
- | Publication Date: Nov 13, 2018
- | Number of Pages: 220 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Hardcover
- | ISBN-10: 1138614742
- | ISBN-13: 9781138614741
