The Europeanisation of Italian Interest Groups

Although the study of interest group politics is a relatively small field within political science, over the last fifteen years an impressive amount of empirical research on interest groups has been produced. Unfortunately, Italy has not been infected with this renewed attention to interest group politics, and the Italian case is still absent in any comparative research. This is not surprising, though: traditionally, Italian scholars have analysed this topic only with regard to the post-war period of democratic consolidation, and only by focusing on party politics and electoral behaviour. More recently, policy analysts have revived the topic, demonstrating that business groups, trade unions, and many other groups play a major role in policymaking. Yet only sectional analyses have been provided, and the Italian interest system has not been considered a research subject per se to date. This paper aims to address exactly this lacuna. More precisely, one of the main added values of this study lies in presenting the first database capturing the number and diversity of Italian interest groups active at national level. No one has done anything like this so far. Yet, this analysis makes a step further, and focuses on the degree of Europeanisation that characterises Italian interest groups: how often have groups actively sought access to different EU level institutions and agencies in order to influence public policies? How important are European policies for Italian interest groups? What percentage of groups’ resources is spent focusing on EU policies? In order to answer these questions, original data coming from a national survey conducted on more than 1,500 Italian interest groups are provided. Empirical results are rather interesting: many organisational characteristics do have an impact on the degree of Europeanisation different groups show. However, some empirical results seem to contradict the conventional wisdom, appearing as a sort of ‘Italian peculiarity’. On these aspects, further research is therefore needed.