National Interest Organizations in the EU Multilevel System

Political scientists have always accorded interest organizations a prominent place in European Union (EU) policy-making because they connect the EU institutions to citizens, provide important information to EU policy-makers, and control resources that impact on the problem-solving capacity of EU policies. In other words, they are vital to both the input legitimacy and the output legitimacy of the EU. So far, research on interest organizations in EU policy-making has concentrated on EU-level interest organizations and EU-level politics. This edited book draws attention to the role national interest organizations play in the EU multilevel system. All contributions present state-of-the-art research on that subject in the form of theory-driven empirical analyses.

Chapters 8 and 9 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Rainer Eising is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He has published widely on interest groups, multilevel governance, and policy-making in the EU. He was principal investigator in the INTEREURO project and has recently directed a MERCUR project on interest groups in German political arenas.

Daniel Rasch is a post-doctoral researcher at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer. His research focuses on international as well as national interest mediation, governance and research methods.

Patrycja Rozbicka is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Aston Centre for Europe, Aston University, Birmingham, UK. Her research focuses on the comparative analysis of interest groups’ activity in national and European policy-making, and politics of live music industry in the UK and Europe.