Lobbying, Social Media and Strategies of Interest Representation in the EU

Institutional and organisational rules and norms shape interest group advocacy strategies. In the EU, this has had a conspicuous affect. Evidence-based decision-making has led to a preponderance of evidence-based lobbying and a ‘professionalization’ of interest groups. Interest groups trade in policy-relevant information, mirror the policy activities of decision-makers and act as veritable “service bureaus” or “adjuncts” to EU policy-makers and their staff. An important and recent part of this transformation is the use of innovative Social Media lobbying strategies. Current interest group research is either relatively silent on these issues or remains somewhat anachronistic, conceiving of a broad and ill-defined distinction between inside and outside lobbying strategies. Drawing on an original dataset gathered from a large-scale online survey of over 4000 interest groups, this paper assesses the importance of social media in EU-level lobbying through several related questions: To what extent have EU level interest groups adopted social media strategies? How do social media strategies compare to old-fashioned long-established tactics or so-called outside lobbying tactics? Which types of interest groups use these new strategies and for what reasons? How do interest groups use social media to interact with decision-makers, other interest groups, and their own members? Similarly, how do interest groups use social media to interact with the news media in order to control their media presence? Results from empirical research suggests that social media remains a secondary and emerging lobbying strategy at the EU level, whose main added relevance lies in networking strategies as well as managing media presence.