Inside the EU Business Associations

There are approximately 950 business interest associations organised at the EU level and formally constituted in law, accounting for around two-thirds of all EU formal interest organisations. This book is intended for those interested in: It presents fresh results, drawn from a unique data-set consisting of 49 interviews conducted with EU business associations and 151 conducted with their members, undertaken between 1998 and 2001, and from a wide-ranging review of the literature on business interest associations and EU interest representation. It is a contribution to a number of new and contemporary debates of concern both to analysts of European integration and business interest associations, and to those who work in and with EU business associations. It seeks to be accessible to all these types of readers, whether ‘academic’ or ‘practitioner’.

The data-set upon which this research is based is unique. Interviews were undertaken with 49 EU business associations, and 151 of their members and non-members, making it easily the most comprehensive analysis of EU business associations ever undertaken. Yet ‘interest-group’ type research is notoriously weak and unreflective on methods, despite (and perhaps because of) the complexity of the topics being investigated. This complexity derives from the relational nature of most of the topics under investigation, such as the impact of a particular private interest source upon a public policy outcome, or the factors at play between an association and its members, or between its members. Because the conclusions drawn from an analysis are only as good as the methodology employed, this chapter identifies the approaches used, articulates the rationale informing the choices made, traces the steps undertaken in collecting the data, and discusses the issues that arose as the data were collected. In laying these out, the aim is to ensure that the reader can:

In this chapter, the choice of each of the 28 factors held to differentiate associational governability are justified by reference to both previous research and analysis, and to factors which have arisen inductively following the data collection. In the case of the former, the established literature on associations requires some adaptation to the EU context. An explanation of each factor in the context of EU associations is followed in each case by a justification for their weighting and ranking which is used to provide the results presented in Chapter 4.

This chapter presents the results from interviews with EU associations, their members and non-members. Focusing the discussion in this chapter on domain-based associations, it identifies the patterns that arose in assessing causal factors of variation and similarity between associations in their ability to unify their members’ interests, and to secure the compliance of their members with associational goals, that is their ‘governability’. Given that most of these factors are present in the external environment of associations and are matters over which associations have little influence, the results presented in this chapter should not be read as an appraisal of these organisations. Thus, the results presented in Tables 4.1–4.3 in the pages that follow, obtained from following the methodology outlined in Chapter 2, are not ‘league tables’ of ‘associational effectiveness’ or ‘performance’, rather they seek to assess the factors of governability proposed in Chapter 3, to help identify the causal factors of variation between associations. Because of this, the discussion of results in this chapter after presentation of the tables occurs without a detailed focus upon any one individual association.

In this chapter, descriptions are provided of the business-wide associations AMCHAM-EU (EU Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce), ERT (European Round Table of Industrialists), EUROCHAMBRES (Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry), UEAPME (European Association of Craft, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises) and UNICE (Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe), followed by an assessment of the ‘governability’ of each of these organisations drawn both from the wider literature in the public domain and from the results presented in Chapter 4. The wider literature was used alongside survey factors to assess governability because some of the factors of governability are more oriented towards sectoral organisations and could not be used for cross-sectoral organisations. Thus, indicators of governability that could not be used included the degree of presence of (weighting in brackets):

In order to understand the governability of EU business associations, an essential first step is to appreciate the type of organisations they are, and the influences exerted by the environment in which they operate. In this concluding chapter, these key factors are summarised ahead of the other main influences on governability identified by the research on which this book has been based, and the contribution lent to methodology. The focus of these conclusions is to identify and assert the main findings, rather than to re-rehearse the ways in which they have been arrived at, or to aim to list once more every single causal factor explaining variation in governability. The richness of detail can be found in other chapters. One factor is, however, worth restating at this point, and that is that the focus of this book is to examine how the EU environment influences the governability of EU business associations, and to identify the principal causes of variation of governability — defined in Chapter 1 as their ability to unify their members’ interests and to secure goal compliance.