Who leads the band? Cues, counters and bandwagons among interest groups active at the European Commission

Most policy issues receive attention from only a couple of interest groups whereas a few issues attract a large amount of lobbying activity. This variation can be largely explained by positive feedback mechanisms: once certain groups start lobbying, others follow, creating a lobbying bandwagon on a particular issue. Theories of political strategies leads us to expect that NGOs strategically benefit from the development of bandwagons, given that an increase in the number of actors shifts the balance of power in their favour and potentially triggers outside engagement on issues. In this article we conceptually challenge this assumption because bandwagons, especially in the EU case, primarily pull in other well-organized, relatively supportive insiders rather than trigger public attention that may lead to the engagement of outside challengers. Given the large numbers of business lobbyists in Brussels, any policy bandwagonning of interest groups therefore leads to more business bias. This paper illustrates this dynamic on the basis of time series data of lobby meetings with European Commissioners and their senior staff between 2014 and 2024 on a large number of issues. We analyse the sequentially of meetings using vector autoregression and assess which types of groups are more likely to have meetings immediately after one another. The results indicate that lobbying by organisations representing business interests drives subsequent business lobbying, with NGO ‘following’ only sometimes and hardly ever ‘lead’ a lobbying sequence. As a consequence, once the scope of interest group mobilization increases, business bias also increases.