Is There a Switch in Accent for the Heavenly Chorus? Explaining differences in interest group preference attainment in the European Union’s climate action policies

Abstract

Over the past five years, there has been an increase in national and supranational efforts to combat climate change. The European Union’s (EU) ambitious climate initiative, the European Green Deal (EUGD), remains the Union’s most significant effort to combat the climate crisis in a cost-efficient manner. However, climate initiatives such as the EUGD are often not as ambitious as some civil society organizations would prefer, nor as cost-efficient as some economic interest groups would like.

The EU’s climate policy is a highly politicized area, and due to scant quantitative research, we still know relatively little about which systematic patterns characterize interest group success in EU climate policy across policy issues and types of groups.

This thesis aims to provide further insights into the conditions and extent to which interest groups are successful in EU climate action policies. Hypotheses were deducted based on the results of previous literature. An original dataset was created based on Open Public Consultation (OPC) surveys from three climate action initiatives proposed by the European Commission (EC) to answer the research question and test the hypotheses. Lobbying success is understood as preference attainment. In this sense, interest groups expressed positions in the three OPC surveys were matched against final policy outcomes to determine the level of preference attainment. This dataset was used as the basis for multinomial regression analysis. Explanatory factors related to interest group- and policy context characteristics are explored in the analysis.

The empirical results indicate that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and environmental organizations are more successful in the context of the EU’s climate action policies than business interests. That is, NGOs and environmental organizations are more likely to receive higher degrees of preference attainment than lower degrees compared with business interests. The analysis also tests for the effect of factors such as resources, salience, interest group organizational form, and lobbying coalitions on degree of preference attainment. However, I only find support for one of my hypotheses, that NGOs and environmental organizations are more successful than business interests.