Lobbying Across Multiple Levels: German Federal Institutions, European Union, and the Länder

Interest groups can lobby on different levels of government to influence national legislation. But while research on the relationship between the national and the supranational level in the context of interest group politics is quite developed, the subnational level of policymaking is frequently overlooked in the literature on interest group politics. Moreover, we do not know how interest group strategies at these three levels are interrelated. Our paper seeks to contribute deeper insights in research on subnational and multilevel lobbying as well as on venue choice and arena entry. It explores how and under which circumstances organized interests engage on multiple levels, switch from one level to another, and coordinate their political activities across different levels. Adapting Greenwood’s (2017) argument about different routes for influence-seeking in the EU to national policymaking in a multilevel system, we expect interest groups to primarily address the national executive and – to a lesser extent – parliament as the institutions with the greatest power over national legislation. However, if an interest group finds no support for its position on the national level, it may choose a route via different levels of government. We argue that interest groups sometimes to take a Brussels route to national policymaking and lobby the EU, since many important political decisions on national legislation are taken at the supranational level. Furthermore, we investigate two possible subnational routes in cases where the subnational level is involved in policymaking. A second-chamber route to national poli-cymaking offers interest groups the opportunity to pursue amendments on a bill by lobbying governments of federal states. Finally, a subnational-Brussel route to national policymaking is based on the ability of the subnational level of government to influence policymaking at the EU level. Empirically, we investigate the case of Germany, as the German federal system processes policies from the subnational, national and European levels. Analysing observational and survey data on interest group behaviour in the context of 25 legislative proposals that were drafted in the year 2019 and vary with respect to policy area and reach across the three levels of government enables us predict the arena and route choices of interest groups. Our explanatory variables focus on the proposal level (position of decision-makers, proposal type, salience, and conflict) as well as on the interest group level (positions, types, internal structure and resources of groups).