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Lobbyism in the EU Comitology System

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Lobbying in the European Union

Abstract

Nedergaard et al. focus in their contribution on a largely understudied field of lobbyism on European level: the EU comitology system. This concept refers to the process by which the European Commission adopts implementing or administrative acts on authority delegated by Council and European Parliament and which is often done under the control of a comitology committee composed of officials from member states and chaired by the Commission. The complexity of this system makes it—compared to the more transparent ordinary legislative procedure—less obvious when and where interest representatives get active during the process. Given the lack of scholarly literature, the authors base their analysis on two case studies and provide by this approach a specific and also an interesting insight into a little-known aspect of policymaking. They identify which interests are active, which institutions and stakeholders are targets of lobbying and when and where lobbyists gain access. And finally they give an answer to the questions whether lobbying activities by business interests have altered their focus in the post-Lisbon comitology system and why this field of lobbyism would deserve more scientific research.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Philip Larsen for research assistance on this chapter, which is a revised version of Wetendorff Nørgaard, Nedergaard and Blom-Hansen (2014). The material is reused after permission by Taylor & Francis Ltd. (www.tandfonline.com).

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Correspondence to Peter Nedergaard .

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 11.2 List of informants

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Nørgaard, R.W., Nedergaard, P., Blom-Hansen, J. (2019). Lobbyism in the EU Comitology System. In: Dialer, D., Richter, M. (eds) Lobbying in the European Union. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98800-9_11

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