Most scholars tend to agree that the EU interest system is biased towards business interests at the expense of citizen groups. Nonetheless, the dominance of business does seem to vary across the lobby process (i.e. mobilization, access, and influence) and across different EU institutions. For instance, while most studies indicate that business mobilizes more easily towards the EU institutions, recent studies suggest that this does not necessarily translate into increased influence of business on EU policymaking. The goal of this paper is therefore to entangle how bias exactly varies throughout the different stages of the EU lobby process, and at the main EU institutions. More specifically, I coded all articles (35) that dealt with this issue in five leading journals on EU policy-making between 1995 and 2013. This allows me to assess the severity of bias in the EU interest system as well as locate potential gaps in the literature.
