Reconciling Professionalisation and Democracy in EU Lobbying: Representation as Advocacy

Brussels is a ‘Field of Dreams’ for lobbyists (and academics studying policymaking and EU politics generally). In recent years research on advocacy and lobbying has increasingly addressed the professionalization process. For example: Beyers (2008) notes that interest groups must act in a professional manner to successfully gain access to policymakers; Maloney (2012) has argued that groups need to professionalize their structure and operating behaviour for organization maintenance and survival reasons; and Saurugger (2007: 397) notes that organized civil society has ‘professionalized to represent the interests of their constituency in an efficient way'. However organizational professionalization and the professionalization of lobbying practices at the EU level (and elsewhere) appear to undermine the EUs quest to: ‘bring citizens in’; enhance representation, attain better policy outcomes; and generally improve the quality of democracy. Despite the prevailing ‘citizenization’ agenda in the EU, with 2013 designated the European Year of Citizens, it seems that organisations may have weaker incentives to strengthen links with citizens than they do to professionalise. Resolving this conflict may lie less with the actors and activities and more with our understandings of the democratic contribution of advocacy and indirectness. Viewing advocacy as a form of representation can turn attention towards the potentially valuable contribution it makes in the realms of will formation, interest articulation, deliberation, and capacity building which while separate to the actual ‘decision’ moment in politics, are crucial to the context within which it operates. This paper combines an empirical examination (with new primary data) of representation as advocacy in light of trends towards professionalization finding that with a more radical understanding of what constitutes democratic political action there may be potential for democratic representation where it may previously have been assumed that this was weak or even absent.