Interest Groups, Bureaucrats and Access to the European Commission: Evidence from Network Models

Who gets access to the European Commission (EC), and how does its administrative organization shape contacts to lobbying actors across Directorates-General (DGs)? Research on interest group access to European Union politics has revealed nuanced insights into how factors such as institutional venues and group resources influence contacts with decision-makers (e.g., Eising, 2007). In alignment with the regulatory nature of EU governance, these studies early on acknowledged the role of the EC as a pivotal venue for informational lobbying by organized interests. At the same time, work on the administrative dimension of the EC stresses that its policy-making activity is shaped by tensions between centralization and politicization on the one hand, as well as fragmentation and increasing autonomy of service officials on the other (Trondal & Bauer, 2017; Kassim, 2013; Bauer & Ege, 2012). Yet, the lobbying literature has only recently begun to explore the executive’s “black box” by examining access not to a coherent unit but a differentiated bureaucracy (Albareda et al., 2023). The transfer of access goods varies across lobbying venues (Bouwen, 2004), and bureaucrats employ the supply of policy information strategically and selectively (e.g., Poppelaars, 2009). First, cabinets and the services may therefore occupy complementary roles in departmental information processing–for instance, by separating political from technical information-gathering. Alternatively, role differentiation may reflect strategic information use to reinforce or alter vertical principal–agent asymmetries (McCubbins & Schwartz, 1984). Secondly, access can be structured differently depending on the policy area (Vikberg, 2020), so that access patterns may reflect distinct logics of administrative subunits. This paper examines what shapes lobbyist-bureaucrat ties in the EC by building on two contributions. First, since 2025, the EC has extended its transparency requirements on meetings with interest representatives to all Commission staff holding management functions (including Directors and Heads of Unit). This offers the possibility to consider the role of administrative organization in the building of access ties between interest organizations and Commission officials. Secondly, this study explicitly models these relations as networks (for applications of network analysis to EU politics, see, e.g., Bunea et al., 2022; or Azaiez, 2025) because, in contrast to standard regression models, inferential network analysis allows meetings to be modeled as interdependent observations and thus helps trace the mechanisms that explain the formation of ties. Studies of information exchange in policy networks suggest that interactions among policy actors are shaped by structural processes (e.g., Leifeld & Schneider, 2012). I construct uni- and bipartite networks of interest organization-official meetings and investigate the processes of tie building using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) within a comparative framework, covering multiple DGs. This allows me to translate theoretical expectations about lobbying and administrative logics into network configurations capturing systematic processes of access formation–including how access relates to group types and administrative roles, and how interactions concentrate and cluster in ways consistent with phenomena such as politicization, administrative steering and fragmentation/siloization, as well as potential insiderness and DG-specific access regimes.