Interest Group Framing in the European Union: membership representation or institutional appeal?

This research starts from the observation that the study of interest groups and in particular of interest group framing remain a niche within political science although it is central to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies. By strategically highlighting some aspect of a policy proposal while omitting others, interest groups frame it. This study examines the extent to which different types of interest groups and European institutions affect the frame selection by interest groups when lobbying. This case study is based on the ePrivacy regulation. The ‘two logics of interest groups’, developed by Klüver, Mahoney and Opper (2015), serve as the theoretical basis. They postulate that the organizational structure of interest groups as well as the characteristics of the EU institution that has been lobbied, influence interest group’s frame selection. Three types of interest groups, namely sectional groups, cause groups, and firms are subject to the analysis. They do not only represent different interests (private versus public interests) but they also possess different organizational structures. While scholars commonly approach the topic of framing quantitatively, this study takes a qualitative approach. It therefore overcomes underlying methodological obstacles and adds clear value to the existing literature. A dual approach of hand-coding and computer-assisted qualitative content analysis through the software MAXQDA allows to gain a detailed insight into the selected policy proposal, namely the ePrivacy regulation. This research revealed that frame choice varies systematically across the types of interest groups. Additionally, the findings also suggest that frame choice is not necessarily affected by the institutional characteristics of the European Commission and the European Parliament respectively. The narrow focus on studying economic and public frames with regards to the ePrivacy regulation provides room for further research. Extending this study to the Council, selecting another policy area or including other types of frames would allow to enrich the research findings.