Coalition Networks and Lobbying Success: A Communicational Analysis on EU Business Stakeholders

This paper develops a multidimensional framework to explain when and how EU business stakeholders achieve lobbying success by linking preference-based coalition structures to policy-text alignment across legislative stages. It responds to limitations in existing EU lobbying research that often equates success with access, treats influence as a static end-point, or reduces each legislative file to a single dominant conflict dimension. Instead, the paper conceptualises lobbying success as a relational trajectory: the evolving degree of alignment between stakeholders’ expressed preferences and institutional texts across sequential phases of the Ordinary Legislative Procedure. The theoretical argument bridges resource-exchange models with a communicational perspective on lobbying. While acknowledging that policy-relevant information and expertise remain central currencies of influence, the paper stresses that even “technical” information is not ideologically neutral. Resourceful actors may shape outcomes not only by supplying higher-quality expertise but by framing problems, selecting metrics, and competing to define what counts as relevant policy knowledge. Coalition-making therefore becomes a key mechanism through which communicative power is expressed and aggregated. Empirically, the study analyses regulations and directives adopted under the OLP during the 2019–2024 European Parliament legislature, including only cases with sufficient business feedback. Lobbying success is operationalised separately for the formulation and adoption stages by comparing business submissions on the Commission’s Have Your Say portal with baseline and output documents at each stage. The paper identifies issue dimensions using sentence embeddings and clustering, extracts stakeholder stances via NLI-based zero-shot classification, and computes success as stage-to-stage changes in alignment across multiple policy breakpoints. The central hypothesis is that business stakeholders holding more central positions in signed coalition networks of alignment and opposition are more likely to secure greater preference attainment. This approach offers a process-oriented, network-based account of business influence that better captures cross-issue trade-offs and the shifting structure of EU policy conflicts.