Whose Bright Idea Was It Anyway? Understanding How Lobbyists Produce Knowledge

Over the last 20 years there has been an explosion in studies examining interest groups’ role in the European Union’s policymaking. This body of work provides a remarkable mapping of interest group mobilization, strategic behaviour, and influence. Drawing from rational choice, scholars employ most notably resource-exchange frames which stress the role of expertise as a critical resource in a demand/ supply context. Specifically, interest groups supply expertise as a means of building trusted relationships with policymakers over time, to gain access to policymaking procedures, and potentially influence policy. Conversely, strapped for resources policymakers demand valuable expertise from interest groups, expertise which allows them to meet their institutional responsibilities. We know much about the complex activity and mobilization of interest groups, affected by variables at different levels such as: macro-level forces (e.g. institutional characteristics), meso-level dynamics (e.g. policy and organizational characteristics), and micro-level strategies (e.g. individual’s professional experience). Across these levels of variables information-expertise remains a constant. Nevertheless, we know remarkably little about how this information-expertise is produced. On the one hand, this is an expression of rational-choice approaches that downplay the social process of knowledge production. This is particularly surprising given that the majority of organized interested in Brussels are associations, which by default draw from different sources to generate expertise. Simultaneously, most lobbying takes place via coalitions who engage in active information-exchange and processing amongst partners and with policymakers, through iterative procedures. On the other hand, this approach overemphasizes linear approaches to policymaking, downplaying the interaction between interest groups and policymakers, and its impact on knowledge production. Thus, we know information-expertise is a critical component in Brussels and that interest groups are some of its main suppliers. However, know very little about how it is produced given the complex dynamics the literature discusses. In turn, this reduces our ability to disentangle coalition dynamics (e.g. how lobbyists contribute to and draw from collective policymaking knowledge), procedural objectives (e.g. lobbying as advocacy vs. lobbying as learning) and outcomes (e.g. who influences whom) while distorting our understanding of knowledge’s role in EU policymaking. As part of a wider project that attempts to chart and conceptualize how expertise is produced within interest groups, this paper aims to formulate a conceptual model that encompasses the different multi-level dynamics that can impact knowledge production within interest groups. In doing so, it generates testable expectations while bridging work from the literature on knowledge in international organizations (Haas 2018), the role of knowledge and expertise in the EU (e.g. Gora et al. 2018), and knowledge use by non-state actors (Seibicke 2020).