The Landscape of Women’s Interest Groups in the EU: Exploring (Power) Structures and Organisational Dynamics

Interest groups are widely recognised as a cornerstone of the EU’s democratic system, shaping debates, informing policymakers and articulating societal concerns. Within this landscape, women’s interest groups (WIGs) represent a distinctive set of actors that have contributed to advancing gender equality as a political project of the European Union. While the current research panorama has mainly focused on the European Women’s Lobby as the main civil society actor in gender equality policymaking, little systematic attention has been paid to the presence and activity of other groups in this area. As a result, we lack a comprehensive picture of the broader ecosystem of women’s groups, and consequently an understanding of how women’s interests are represented, articulated, and channelled at the EU level. The aim of this paper is to address that gap by developing an operational definition of WIGs active in EU policymaking and shedding light on the patterns of dominance, cooperation, and competition that structure their ecosystem. The analysis proceeds in three different steps: it maps which organisations qualify as WIGs, identifies which actors dominate women’s interest representation, and examines which conflicting camps shape the advocacy landscape. The paper combines representative claims-making with a feminist approach to classification for conceptually defining and empirically identifying WIGs, based on data from the EU Transparency Register. My preliminary results show that the representation of women’s interests in the EU is strongly dominated by a small number of resourceful and politically well-connected actors, while the broader advocacy space is characterised by significant heterogeneity and competing camps, some of which remain marginalised.