EU Funding and Democracy into Focus

The question of to which extent the funding of interest groups can be considered as a legitimate and democratic practice has been often discussed by scholars (Sanchez Salgado 2014; Greenwood 2007; kohler-koch and Quittkat 2013). The study of democracy and the credibility of interest groups is particularly relevant in Covid-19 times. Despite the interest for this topic, the complexity involved in assessing empirically how EU funds may or not contribute to democracy has been a great challenge. Existing evidence can led to different conclusions depending on the conception of democracy that is put forward by scholars. EU funding benefits well-resourced and professionalized interest groups raising some questions regarding the elitist character of the EU pluralist system of interest representation. On the other hand, EU funds contribute to addressing unbalances in the system of interest representation from the perspective of associative democracy. The contribution of this article to current academic discussions consists first on the fact that our study covers not only Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), but all type of interest groups. Second, this paper will take into account different conceptions and approaches to democracy which will give a much more comprehensive and nuanced picture. We test our hypotheses based on survey among randomly selected interest groups active in the EU (N=311). This data allows us to analyze the nuanced link between government funding and the democratic potential of EU interest group politics.