Inclusion of Interest Organisations in Formulation of National Position towards EU Legislation

National interest groups are no longer active solely at domestic level but are becoming increasingly relevant also in EU policy making (Eising, 2008: 10). Interest organisations have in European Union increased number of access point for inclusion into EU policy making. In fact interest groups now have to practice dual strategy and promote their interest to domestic and European institutions (Eising, 2008: 10). But it is necessary to point out that access point within particular country are not evenly distributed (Wallace, 2010: 89). Interest groups for this matter search different channels for influencing EU policy making, one is definitely through national policy actors. Our preliminary data analysis of data gathered in five countries (Hafner-Fink, Novak, Fink Hafner, 2014) reveals that not all interest organisations enter EU arena when lobbying for their interest in EU legislations but majority of interest organisations target national access points when influencing EU policy making. Also other research results show that even thou domestic organisations recognise the meaning of EU level and try to influence EU policy making they are priory influencing national level and national policy making (Lundberg and Sedelius 2014: 323). For this reason we are interested in how do national interest organisations affect EU legislation through national points. Our contribution focuses on a bottom-up view of the inputs of national interest organisations into EU-level policymaking. Interest organisations can on specific conflict issue take the side of the opposition or the side of coalition in relation to main national position that is presented at the EU level. Which side the interest organisations will take might be depended on policy position where the interest group is active, interest group type, policy stage, frequency of contacts between interest organisations and policy official and an economic consequence of proposal. We will test our hypothesis on interviews with national policy officials on selected most salient twenty proposals of directive between 2008 and 2010. The data were collected in frame of INTEREURO Multi-Level Governance Module (MLG) (Bayers et al. 2014; www.intereuro.eu). In the analysis we will focus on the inputs of national interest organisations into formation of national position towards EU legislation. We will use social network analysis. Involvement of interest organisations in specific issues is conceptualised as 2-mode signed network, where one sets of units represent interest organisations, second set of units represent conflicting issues in policy proposal, the relation between interest groups and issues is defined as reported stand of interest organisation on specific issue by national officials: from Left which is based on the idea of less regulation and harmonisation in EU (negative) to Right, which stands for more regulation and harmonisation in EU (positive) on 1 to 100 scale. The 1 to 100 scale was dichotomised into positive-negative (L-R). The theory of structural balance will be used.