Too Many Issues, Too Little Attention: Interest Groups and Negative Agenda-Setting in the EU

This paper develops a novel theory of negative agenda-setting by interest groups, proposing that organizations' “nightmare” issues are more likely to be excluded from the policy agenda when other actors introduce numerous competing issues within the same policy domain. By creating temporal saturation, these competing issues overwhelm policymakers’ limited attention and cognitive capacity, producing emergent non-decision-making. In other words, the suppression of nightmare issues is not necessarily always the result of individual groups' resource capacities or tactical decisions but may also arise indirectly from the overall structure of agenda competition and the scarcity of policymakers' attention. I test this argument withing the European Union using a survey of 485 EU-level interest groups, who identified their most feared nightmare issues, combined with a large-scale, LLM-assisted content analysis of policy agendas of the European Commission. By linking agenda competition, limited attention, and issue crowding, this study sheds light on the hidden dynamics of power and the systemic conditions that determine which policy issues fail to enter the list of policy priorities.