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Searching for influence: interest groups and social movements in the European Union

The study of lobbying in the European Union is an intriguing and ongoing story. Decades of research have yielded a large number of contributions that combine general perspectives on interest groups and lobbying with the specificities of the multi-level and multi-institutional context of the EU political system. Academic attention to interest groups has only increased as their numbers have risen with deepening European integration (Beyers, Eising, and Maloney 2008) and continues today (Eising, Rasch, and Rozbicka 2017). A number of questions regularly arise, not only about groups’ influence on policy, but also potential bias in the interest group system and the factors behind it. The four books reviewed here reflect the ongoing development of EU interest group studies as they dig into old questions but yield new insights. The books offer a wide array of theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives on interest group research and social movements, and their combination suggests where further steps can be taken and where the limits to research may lie. We begin the review by examining the only edited volume, which provides a good overview of the current state of the art in EU interest group research as well as practitioners’ insights. The rest of the review examines these insights’ overlap with the current academic developments explored in the other three books, before reflecting on potential future advances.