Conceptually, this work is meant to be the follow-up of my previous thesis on alternative regulatory frameworks of lobbying practices in the EU.
After having focused on the formal aspects and on the rules regarding the concept of interest representation at the supranational level, I’m going now to focus on an outlook which considers contents, strategies and some phenomena, like Europeanization, which are far from being irrelevant, in concrete terms, at the national level.
To illustrate how new EU lobbies mobilise, this thesis describes and analyses how individual and collective actors lobby in the EU and how their behaviour has developed, which is a fundamental step in order to assess how to monitor and regulate lobbying more generally in the future. The analysis is rooted in two conceptual parts: the former provides an exhaustive picture of the state of the art about interest representation at the supranational level and in the Member States, giving a detailed and updated description of the national contexts where lobbying activities take form, a survey on the different types of interest groups and the characteristics of their collective action, focusing on business interests, with a particular outlook on the trade associations of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, which has been, for the past few years, the main object of EU industrial policy.
The latter shows how what has been proposed in the first part is naturally affected by some trends which have never found unambiguous empirical answers and have provided contradictory explanations in the most recent analyses.
Considering all the latest studies and using empirical evidence, the last part pursue the idea that EU integration and identity building have concrete influence on lobbying practices at the national level, which merits to be examined and evaluated, in order to take advantage of the lessons we can learn and trace future evolutions of behaviours.