Research Papers

Interest group participation in the EU has developed for a long time ad hoc. It was only during the 1990s that the EU first attempted to regulate interest representation in a more formalised way. The paper identifies three shifts in paradigm in the EU’s approach to interest group regulation, illustrating shifting concerns regarding transparency and representativity of interest group participation in relation to broader objectives of effectiveness and legitimacy. The first paradigm is set by two Commission Communications adopted in 1992 which focus on the relation between transparency and interest groups and not on the representative nature of interest representation. The second paradigm is mainly set by the 2001 White Paper on European Governance, charachterised by a conceptual shift from ‘interest groups’ to ‘civil society’and aiming at transparency, system representativeness and organisational representativeness. The third paradigm develops around the European Transparency Initiative (ETI). There is a conceptual return to interest groups rather than civil society and the ETI is primarily concerned with transparency rather than with representation. However, the ETI also includes the seeds for a reemergence of the representativeness concept at a later stage.