This article seeks to explain the use of inside and outside lobbying by organised interests at global diplomatic conferences. At first sight, the lobbying at these venues is puzzling as it does not seem to be a very fruitful way to acquire influence. The use of outside strategies especially is perplexing because most aspects of international negotiations fall outside of the purview of national constituencies. It is argued in this article, however, that the presence of outside lobbying is not so puzzling if lobbying is seen both as a way to attain influence and as a way to pursue organisational maintenance goals. Empirically, the article draws on interview data with 232 interest group representatives that participated at either the 2012 session of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Geneva, or the 2011 (Durban) and 2012 (Doha) United Nations Climate Conferences. The analysis demonstrates that organisational needs, and especially the competition actors face in obtaining resources, significantly affects the relative focus of organised interests on inside and outside lobbying.

This article examines the coverage of legislative lobbying in European news media. The starting point thereby is that lobbying in the crowded EU-level interest community is not only a struggle for direct access to policymakers, but that in order to realize policy goals many interest groups rely on political attention generated by the media. Our main research question is how media attention is skewed towards particular interests and which factors explain these varying levels of prominence. Our empirical analysis is based on a set of 125 legislative proposals adopted by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010. For all these cases we identified 379 interest organizations that made public statements, we coded the amount of media attention these organized interest gained, the type of statements they made as well as some key organizational features. While the aggregate levels of attention look pretty balanced, our evidence shows that media prominence is skewed towards particular types of interests, more in particularly that organized interests which oppose a proposed policy gain significantly higher levels of media attention.

EU politics has long been portrayed as an elite affair in which technocratic deliberation prevails. As a consequence, information supply by interest groups has typically been viewed as part of an expertise‐based exchange with policy‐makers. Less attention has been devoted to whether the supply of information is also used to exert political pressure. In addition to expertise‐based exchanges between interest groups and policy‐makers, can we identify the prevalence of information supply that aims to put pressure on EU policy‐makers? And under what conditions are different modes of information supply likely to occur? My analysis relies on interviews with 143 lobbyists who were active on a set of 78 legislative proposals submitted by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010. The results demonstrate that expertise‐based exchanges are dominant in interactions with civil servants, while political information is predominantly communicated to political officials and often the key substance in outside lobbying tactics.

Contemporary European studies concur that public pressure and responsiveness have become key ingredients of the EU policy arena. Nonetheless, there is little known about when and how the elites in Brussels articulate public interests in EU policy debates. This article bridges this gap by examining the conditions under which political elites involved in EU legislative procedures address public interests in the news. It is expected that the politicization of EU policy processes stimulates elites to articulate public interests. The dataset consists of 2164 media statements in six European media outlets on a sample of 125 legislative proposals (2008)(2009)(2010). The results demonstrate that elites address public interests in the media predominantly when issues are publicly salient and attract intensive mobilization by civil society groups. Elites stay silent about public interests when policy processes are crowded with business lobbyists and are of low salience to European citizens.