The lobbying battle for agenda-setting influence: a matter of broad societal support?

Current literature often portrays the European Commission as an executive bureaucracy serving a largely technocratic function. This led interest group scholarship to suggest that Commission officials are predominantly driven by output legitimacy considerations and mostly receptive to the demands of stakeholders that supply expert knowledge. This characterization of the Commission is, arguably, a consequence of the traditional focus on policy formulation as a process guided by cost-benefit analyses of various policy alternatives. In contrast, this paper argues that when the Commission decides on its policy priorities, it is primarily concerned with its reputation as a responsive agenda-setter. Indeed, recent years have witnessed increased pressure on the Commission to move beyond its traditional focus on rational deliberation and address those challenges that matter most for the European polity. In this vein, we expect that stakeholders enjoying broad societal support from both the general public and other interest advocates are most likely to exert influence over the Commission’s policy agenda. Empirically, we rely on a novel dataset containing information on the mobilization of 158 stakeholders on 65 issues connected to European Green Deal (EGD) initiatives. The EGD provides a fruitful setting to test our argument, given that it serves as a symbolic policy agenda helping Commission officials to refute recurring criticisms about their ‘apolitical’ nature. Combining an agenda preference attainment measure with an attributed agenda-setting influence score, the results demonstrate that groups enjoying support from the public at large are more likely to secure agenda-setting influence. Moreover, this effect is contingent on the number of other interest advocates voicing similar agenda demands. The results thus hint towards a pluralist agenda-setting process whereby Commission officials are receptive to societal pressures and popular demands.