Patterns of access: A network analysis of interest groups’ meetings with European Commission officials

This paper presents a network analysis of European Commission policymakers and interest groups, based on observations of their direct contacts. Access to European Commission policymakers shapes effective representation and affects policy influence in the European Union. In the US, the Washington lobbying network was shown to consist of a dense core, where broad issues are monitored by in-house experts, and a periphery dominated by niche issues and hired lobbyists. This paper raises similar questions in the EU, with relevant implications for interest groups’ access to policymakers. What is the structure of the lobbying network that surrounds the European Commission? Can we identify specific policy communities or is there a single, homogenous, policy community? Which interest groups serve as the strongest links between policymakers, and how are different policy areas connected by interest groups? This paper draws a number of expectations from the existing literature on interest group access patterns to the Commission. Using network analysis, it offers a bird’s eye view of these patterns, presenting the most important actors in the interest representation network formed around the Commission. The analysis draws on new data recording 9785 meetings, between 266 Commission officials (directors, commissioners and cabinet members) and 2306 lobbying organizations, held from November 2014 through December 2015. Compared to previous studies, the paper offers a more detailed explanation of interest group access to Commission policymaking. The preliminary results reveal specific clusters of lobbying communities. This could explain contradictions found in the literature on access and influence across different policy areas within the Commission. Furthermore, there is not one EU Commission lobbying community, but rather different communities formed around broad policy areas, each with their corresponding sets of privileged interest groups. Theoretically, this finding supports the increasingly accepted belief among researchers that policy access and influence are highly contextual.