What policy demands articulated by interests groups get translated into policy outcomes and under what conditions? These are the research questions addressed by the proposed study. The paper answers the questions by proposing a two stage analysis. First, the paper empirically estimates interest groups’ demands expressed during the policy formulation stage of five key pieces of EU legislation in the environment policy area, and computes policy preference attainment scores for each interest group. Second, the paper empirically tests an explanatory model for the observed variation in the levels of interest groups’ preference attainment scores which revolves around the idea of a group’s location within a policy network. The main explanatory mechanism tested emphasizes the importance of a group’s position within the policy network and expects that the more central a group’s position is, the higher the level of that group’s preference attainment. The study makes three important contributions. First, the study makes a methodological contribution to the issue of measuring interest groups’ policy preference attainment by exploring a rich yet currently under-researched data source: interest groups’ written contributions to the EC online consultations. Second, the study provides one of the first systematic descriptions of the EU policy space in terms of specific and discrete policy demands expressed by interest groups on the occasion of different policymaking events. Third, the paper proposes a systematic, empirical examination of the factors affecting the level of interest groups’ preference attainment scores, by testing both existing theoretical explanations and the newly proposed explanatory framework.
