The common core of EU lobbying. Explaining lobby presence at multiple EU venues

In the last decade we have seen a wide variety of studies dedicated to map the EU interest group population. Most, if not all, of these studies find that interest mobilization is highly skewed across different policy domains, indicating policy bandwagons and niche mobilization. One of the most crucial downside is of these studies is that they treat all interests groups as equal and, therefore, do not account for the fact that the organizations identified are not all equally engaged in EU lobbying. This lack of attention could have important consequences. First, a focus on aggregate numbers might lead us to overemphasize the size of the lobby community, because many of these actors hardly ever engage in political activity. On the other hand, we might underestimate the importance of other, more specific, interest groups. That is, we know that those interest groups that do engage with political actors over longer periods of time and across multiple issues have considerable advantages to generate political influence and substantially increases their survival chances. In this paper we therefore aim to identify which actors are the ‘common core’ in EU lobbying. In other words, which actors are more active than others in the EU interest population, and why? We identify three distinct categories of explanatory variables. First, we take stock of the organizational features of an interest group whereby we analyze whether some organizational types, such as business organizations, develop a steadier lobby presence than others, such as NGOs. Second, we test for factors located at the issue level. Third, we analyze the importance of domestic embeddedness. Our approach to group explanatory factors in three broad categories allows us to test both within these categories (i.e. which domestic factors are more important), as well as between the three categories (i.e. is variation at the domestic or the global level more important?).