Agenda-setting influence and informational lobbying in EU legislative politics: a technocratic or responsive Commission?

The political influence of interest groups manifests in different stages of the policy cycle. Nevertheless, current scholarship narrowly assesses influence in policy formulation and decision-making, focusing almost exclusively on the extent to which groups shape the direction of public policy. This paper therefore turns to interest groups’ agenda-setting influence in the European Union. Applying a resource dependency perspective to informational lobbying, this paper argues that the European Commission is mostly concerned with input legitimacy in the agenda-setting stage. Consequently, it hypothesises that it will be more responsive to the demands of groups who supply political information. Furthermore, I expect the positive relationship between signalling political information and agenda-setting influence to be contingent upon the communication channel and the active engagement in coalitions.