Frame Resonance and Lobbying Success in EU Consumer Protection Policy

The supranational EU institutions are usually considered the main allies of consumers in Europe and they frequently express the priority of consumer safety. Yet they are continually exposed to harsh criticism voiced by official consumer representatives who point to the adoption of regulations and directives that rather mirror industry interests, oftentimes at the expense of vital consumer interests. How can we account for this puzzling phenomenon given that one of the main goals of the Commission and the European Parliament is the safety of European consumers? I argue that the (un)successful representation of organized interests in the field of consumer policy is driven by the decision-making structures of the EU’s multi-level system of governance and the ability of lobbying coalitions to exploit them through strategies of issue framing. The theoretical framework comprises the concepts of lobbying coalition diversity and policy frame communality which together account for the varying degree of consumer advocates’ lobbying success in the EU. The paper highlights the eminently important but still rather neglected role that argumentation plays in EU interest group politics, particularly in technical policy fields where regulators often rely on external expertise at the various stages of the legislative process to craft policies. This expertise comes in the form of information delivered by stakeholders from both public and private organizations. The theory links pivotal EU decision-makers’ preferences to interest groups and their statements which place emphasis on particular dimensions of an issue while deliberately omitting others. Hypotheses which are derived from the model will be tested against a small set of cases comprising recent EU regulations and directives in the field of consumer safety. Combining preference attainment with process tracing methods I conduct detailed online document and framing analyses to reveal the crucial causal mechanisms behind lobbying success in EU consumer protection policy.