'We have been framed?' The effects of framing on lobbing success

Previous research on lobbying strategies and/or success has stressed the importance of the characteristics of the policy issues, including, for instance, the level of conflict, complexity, public salience or whether a public good is at stake (Beyers 2008, Berkhout 2010, Junk 2015, Klüver 2011, Mahoney 2008). More recently, European interest group scholars have increasingly focused on the phenomenon of framing (Boräng and Naurin 2015, Eising et al. 2015, Klüver and Mahoney 2015, Klüver et al. 2015), meaning the way interest groups select some aspects of a policy issue and make them prominent in their communication (cf. Entman 1993: 52). Bringing these two strands of scholarship together can be insightful, but, at the same time, sobering with regards to earlier findings on policy issue characters as exogenously given. The paper will be based on a new dataset of framing by interest groups on 50 policy issues in media debates in 5 European countries (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Multiple aspects of framing by interest groups, including 1) the framing of an issue's characteristics and 2) substantive frames, will be analyzed and related to the policy outcomes on the issue. Hence, we refine previous research in asking if a dominance of certain frames (in the interest community at large and/or in positional camps) is related to the likelihood that groups attain their preferences in the policy outcomes. Our paper is one of the first relating framing to lobbying success (cf. Klüver and Mahoney 2015 for a trial on a method for this) while conducting a self-critical evaluation of past findings in the literature of group influence. If lobbying success is related to framing, rather than about pre-given issue characteristics, we may have to conclude that "lobbying" matters more than we think.