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The European Commission's relations with interest organisations: master of the information universe.

Greenwood, Justin

Authors

Justin Greenwood



Contributors

Tannelie Blom
Editor

Sophie Vanhoonacker
Editor

Abstract

The relationships between European institutions and interest organizations differ from those of comparable administrations in the extent of reliance upon them for both output and input legitimacy. The European Commission’s roles on policy formulation, implementation, and monitoring make for the most important relationship among EU institutions and interest organizations, in which its use of interest groups as political supporters and messengers is also noteworthy. The Commission has developed a system over the past decade to structure its relationship with ‘interested parties’ in which two-way information flows are central. Does detailed scrutiny of the procedures involved find information-exchange regimes designed (the ‘constitutive politics’) and operationalized (the ‘operational politics’) to maximize benefits in favour of the Commission? To what extent does the emergence of rules and the ways in which these are translated into practice reflect changing goals by the European Commission of its information-exchange regime? These questions are answered by identifying and assessing the changing constitutive and operational politics of the main procedural regimes involved: impact assessments, together with their embedded consultation component as well as procedures for the use of expertise; and transparency-related regimes of access to information, as well as the Transparency Register of ‘interested parties’.

Citation

GREENWOOD, J. 2014. The European Commission's relations with interest organisations: master of the information universe. In Blom, T. and Vanhoonacker, S. (eds.) The Politics of Information: the case of the European Union. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan [online], pages 111-126. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137325419_8

Online Publication Date Jan 1, 2014
Publication Date Jan 1, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Publisher Springer
Pages 111-126
Series Title European administrative governance series
Book Title The Politics of Information: the case of the European Union
ISBN 9781349459377
DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137325419_8
Public URL https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/247353

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