When Interest Groups Align with Citizens: Opinion and Coalition Congruence in EU Public Consultations

The widening gap between policy and citizens' immediate concerns has intensified calls for more inclusive and participatory policymaking. While public consultations can serve as venues for increasing input legitimacy and bridging this democratic deficit, little is known about the conditions under which citizen and interest group feedback align in consultations. Drawing on theories of interest representation and lobbying, I distinguish between two forms of congruence: opinion congruence (natural alignment of policy positions) and coalition congruence (coordinated mobilization of citizens by interest groups). I expect that citizen-interest group congruence will be higher among non-business actors compared to business organizations, and on issues with greater public and advocacy salience. To test these hypotheses, I analyze 195,493 citizen-interest group dyads derived from 14,760 stakeholder submissions across 268 public consultations between 2017-2021. Using semantic similarity measures based on roBERTa language model embeddings, I find strong support for the importance of organizational characteristics in determining congruence. Non-business actors, particularly public authorities and trade unions, demonstrate significantly higher opinion congruence with citizens and greater likelihood of coalition formation compared to business organizations. Both public and advocacy salience positively influence opinion congruence, though the effects are moderate. For coalition formation, advocacy salience matters more than public salience, suggesting that campaign mobilization is potentially a strategic response to competitive lobbying environments.