All Access Points are Not Created Equal: Explaining the Fate of Diffuse Interests in the EU

Abstract

According to literature on organised interests in the European Union, the European Parliament's Environment Committee (ENVI) gives environmental interests a potent point of legislative access. Yet while ENVI helped sustain the EP's commitment to environmental interests in the case of the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive adopted in September 2000, it did not do so for REACH, a regulatory framework for the chemicals sector adopted by the EP and Council in December 2006. Ultimately, the value of legislative access for organised interest groups depends on the extent to which they have privileged interactions with a node in the policy-making apparatus and the degree to which actors in the policy-making process defer to the particular institutional node. For environmental interests, both privileged interactions between environmentalists and ENVI and deference to the committee decline when environmentalists seek regulations that impose concentrated costs on producers. Such instances invoke calls to protect industrial competitiveness and intensify conflict between EP committees.