Unpacking Mixed Evidence of Organized Interest Success in EU Policy-Making: Why Policy Capacities and Behavioral Patterns Affect Lobby Success

The question of whether business organizations are more successful than NGOs in influencing policy outcomes has dominated the literature on organized interests. Yet, findings on lobby success are mixed. While some conclude that business groups are more successful, others find little evidence confirming business influence. We argue that to better understand organized interest success in EU policymaking, we need to account for the actual policy capacities in the hands of organized interests and behavioral patterns of public officials – two factors that have been widely neglected when studying organized interests' success. On the one hand, public officials demand expertise, political information and operational capacity to optimize the input by organized interests for policy formulation and public decision-making. Policy capacities might differ between business groups and NGOs but are also shown to be remarkably similar, yielding the business-NGO much less useful in explain lobby success. On the other hand, public officials are boundedly rational and rely on cognitive rules of thumb and routines when engaging with organized interests for developing policy proposals and legislations. Such behavioral patterns affect the likelihood of lobby success irrespective of being an NGO or business group. We argue that organized interest success cannot be properly explained without taking into account both policy capacities of organized interests and behavioral patterns. We examine this argument with a new dataset of quantitative and qualitative interview data of 109 prominent organized interests involved in 29 EU regulations and directives passed between 2015-2016. Our findings suggest that public officials mostly rely on routines when interacting with organized interests. However, the organizations that are perceived as more decisive for the final policy output are those that can provide expertise and political information. Yet, we also find that these effects are conditional on the salience of the policy issues under discussion. That is, when policy issues are highly salient, routines become important and organized interests that are familiar partners of public officials are decisive for the policy output. Importantly, we observe that whether the organized interest represents business or NGOs is not significantly related to their decisiveness on the policy issue. Overall, our paper demonstrates that policy capacities, rather than organizational type, matter for policy success of organized interests and that, in highly salient issues success depends on crucial behavioral patterns inherent to decision-making by public officials.