The Fate of Diffuse Interests.

The supranational EU institutions are usually considered the main allies of consumers in Europe and they frequently express the priority of consumer safety. Yet they are continually exposed to harsh criticism voiced by official consumer representatives who point to the adoption of regulations and directives that rather mirror industry and producer interests, oftentimes at the expense of vital consumer interests. How can we account for this puzzling phenomenon given that one of the main goals of the Commission and the European Parliament (EP) is the safety of the European consumers through implementing common procedural and product safety standards in all member states? What is further puzzling is that we lack theories that explain why political actors take on positions and arguments revealed by particular non-state actors? I argue that the (un)successful representation of consumer interests in the field of consumer related regulatory policy is driven by the decisionmaking structures of the EU's system of governance, with the EP committees playing a decisive role, and the ability of interest group coalitions to exploit these venues through strategies of issue framing. A theoretical framework is developed that puts emphasis on two main concepts (lobbying coalition diversity and policy frame communality) that, taken together, help to account for lobbying success in the European Union. In general, the paper highlights the eminently important but still rather neglected role that argumentation and persuasion play in EU interest group politics. Particularly in technical policy fields, such as consumer protection, to craft policies pivotal EP decision-makers have to rely on trustworthy and reliable information at the crucial stages of the now dominant codecision procedure. I posit this information comes in the form of expertise delivered by stakeholders from both public and private organizations. Hence, the theoretical model is built on micro foundations which link pivotal EP decision-makers and their issue-specific policy preferences to interest groups and their persuasive statements which place emphasis on particular dimensions of an issue while deliberately omitting others. Hypotheses which are derived from the theoretical model are tested against the case of the 2011 EU regulation on food labeling. Combining preference attainment with process tracing methods I conduct detailed online document and framing analyses to identify the issue-specific grouping of interest groups in lobbying sides and their arguments used toward EU regulators to reveal the crucial causal mechanisms behind lobbying success in EU consumer protection policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]