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Right-wing populist and far right parties are on the rise across Europe. While established parties are suffering dramatic electoral losses, right-wing parties are celebrating one electoral victory after another. To address their radical right challengers, many established parties have adopted a so-called 'accommodative strategy' by taking a more immigration-skeptical policy position. However, it is unclear whether such a strategy yields the expected benefits or whether such a position shift in turn hurts a party electorally. In this article, we find that mainstream left parties benefit from 'going tough on immigration' whereas it neither helps nor hurts mainstream right parties electorally. We arrive at this conclusion through an analysis of 16,811 vote choices in 15 elections in six countries from 1998 until 2013. Our findings have important implications for understanding what explains the rise of far right parties and the changing nature of electoral competition across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative text analysis constitutes a promising new method that allows for measuring the policy positions and the lobbying success of interest groups by analyzing their submissions to legislative consultations (Klüver, 2009). The use of quantitative text analysis allowed me to present a novel and unique research design which was the largest in scope at the time and resulted in important new insights regarding the determinants of lobbying success (Klüver, 2009, 2011, 2013). In their recent article, Bunea and Ibenskas (2015) however question the usefulness of quantitative text analysis for studying interest groups and discuss several issues which in their view constitute important disadvantages of the technique. In this article I carefully discuss each of their arguments and show that none of their objections actually prevents scholars from successfully using quantitative text analysis to study interest groups in the European Union and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framing plays an important role in lobbying, as interest groups strategically highlight some aspects of policy proposals while ignoring others to shape policy debates in their favour. However, due to methodological difficulties, we have remarkably little systematic data about the framing strategies of interest groups. This article therefore proposes a new technique for measuring interest group framing that is based on a quantitative text analysis of interest group position papers and official policy documents. We test this novel methodological approach on the basis of two case studies in the areas of environmental and transport policy in the European Union. We are able to identify the frames employed by all interest groups mobilised in a debate and assess their effectiveness by studying to what extent decision-makers move closer to their policy positions over the course of the policy debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We outline a conceptual framework that identifies and characterizes the contextual nature of interest group politics in the European Union (EU) to better understand variation in interest group mobilization, lobbying strategies and interest group influence. We focus on two sets of contextual factors that affect EU interest group lobbying. First, we argue that interest group activities are shaped by several policy-related factors, namely the complexity, the policy type, the status quo, the salience and the degree of conflict characterizing legislative proposals and the associated issues. Second, we posit that lobbying in the EU is affected by institutional factors that vary within the EU political system, such as the institutional fragmentation within the European Commission and the European Parliament and across different national political systems depending on the patterns of interest intermediation or the vertical and horizontal distribution of powers. Finally, we theorize about the interrelationship between contextual features and interest group properties and summarize the findings of the collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framing plays an important role in public policy. Interest groups strategically highlight some aspects of a policy proposal while ignoring others in order to gain an advantage in the policy debate. However, we know remarkably little about how interest groups choose their frames. This contribution therefore studies the determinants of frame choice during the policy formulation stage in the European Union. We argue that frame choice is a complex process which is simultaneously affected by interest groups as well as contextual characteristics. With regard to interest group characteristics, we expect that frame choice varies systematically across actor type. With regard to contextual characteristics, we hypothesize that the frames that interest groups employ are specifically tailored towards the DGs in charge of drafting the proposal. Our theoretical expectations are tested based on a new and innovative dataset on frame choice of more than 3,000 interest groups in 44 policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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How does ideological congruency affect the speed of legislative decision-making in the European Union? Despite the crucial importance of actor preferences, the effect of partisan alignments and ideological composition of the European institutions has largely been neglected. However, we argue that the ideological congruence between legislative bodies has an important effect on the duration of policy-making. We test our theoretical expectations based on a large new dataset on decision-making speed in the European Union using event history analysis. The findings confirm our theoretical claim indicating that the ideological distance between the European institutions slows down policy-making which has important implications for the problem-solving capacity of political systems more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why does lobbying success in the European Union (EU) vary across interest groups? Even though this question is central to the study of EU policy-making, only few have dealt with it. The small number of existing studies is moreover characterized by a multitude of hypotheses and contradictory findings. This article aims to overcome these shortcomings by presenting a theoretical exchange model that identifies information supply, citizen support and economic power of entire lobbying camps as the major determinants of lobbying success. The hypotheses are empirically evaluated based on a large new dataset. By combining a quantitative text analysis of interest group submissions to Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups, the theoretical expectations are tested across a large number of policy issues and interest groups while controlling for individual interest group and issue characteristics. The empirical analysis confirms the theoretical expectations indicating that lobbying is a collective enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Does lobbying success in the European Union vary systematically across interest group type? Interest groups lobby the European institutions in order to achieve policy decisions that are in line with their own preferences. While some argue that different types of interest groups are equally able to shape European policy-making, others contend that lobbying success is systematically biased towards some powerful interest groups. The empirical evidence is contradictory as previous studies focused either on a specific interest group type or on a specific policy area so that it is difficult to draw general conclusions. This study therefore presents an extensive empirical analysis of lobbying success across a wide variety of interest groups and policy issues by combining a quantitative text analysis of Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups. The findings are promising as they indicate that lobbying success does not vary systematically across interest group type. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why are some interest groups able to lobby political decisions successfully whereas others are not? This article suggests that the issue context is an important source of variation because it can facilitate or hamper the ability of interest groups to lobby decision-makers successfully. In order to test the effect of issue characteristics, this article draws on a new, unprecedented data set of interest group lobbying in the European Union. Using quantitative text analysis to analyse Commission consultations, this article studies lobbying success across 2696 interest groups and 56 policy issues. The findings indicate that lobbying success indeed varies with the issue context, depending on the relative size of lobbying coalitions and the salience of policy issues, whereas individual group characteristics do not exhibit any systematic effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The analysis of interest group influence is crucial in order to explain policy outcomes and to assess the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. However, owing to methodological difficulties in operationalizing influence, only few have studied it. This article therefore proposes a new approach to the measurement of influence, drawing on quantitative text analysis. By comparing interest groups' policy positions with the final policy output, one can draw conclusions about the winners and losers of the decision-making process. In order to examine the applicability of text analysis, a case study is presented comparing hand-coding, WORDSCORES and Wordfish. The results correlate highly and text analysis proves to be a powerful tool to measure interest groups' policy positions, paving the way for the large-scale analysis of interest group influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]