This paper examines the linkage between interest groups’ policy demands and national governments’ policy positions in the Council of the European Union. From the perspective of democratic theory, national governments should respond to and represent the policy demands expressed by interest groups. One way of doing this is to represent interest groups’ policy demands in the Council of the EU. We develop a partisan explanation of variation in national governments’ responses to interest groups’ policy demands. We posit that a government will be more responsive to an interest group’s policy demand if there is a greater ideological congruence between the relevant government minister and the interest group. In other words, the national allocation of ministerial portfolios affects governments’ responsiveness to interest groups’ demands. The relevance of portfolio allocation is in turn gauged by the centralization of the national executive, which is known to vary markedly across EU member states. In states with decentralized national executives, the partisan ideology of the relevant minister has a significant effect in the selection of the interest groups to which government responds. By contrast, in states with centralized executives, the ideological composition of the executive as a whole matters. Our study tests this explanation with new data on interest groups’ policy demands and national governments’ policy positions. The evidence on interest groups’ policy demands is taken from a detailed qualitative coding of documentation from the consultations held by the European Commission prior to the introduction of legislative proposals, which includes a categorization each interest group involved. The information on governments’ policy positions is taken from case studies of Council decision-making on the controversial aspects of the legislative proposals after they were introduced by the Commission.
