European lobbying between transparency and the battle for influence

Lobbying is regulated at European level by permissive legal provisions but, at the same time, disparate or lacking in legislative and application coherence. The state of the European decision-making process reveals the need to bring about changes that require more rigorous, applied and, why not, severe regulation of lobbying and interest representation.

Indigenous Social Movements and Institutional Reform: Mechanisms of Interest Representation in Three Colombian Municipalities

In the 1990s, Colombia passed but unevenly enforced multicultural reforms to address indigenous rights. Parallel to this, decentralization laws delegated key aspects of interest intermediation to local governments. These reforms changed the political opportunity structure that framed the relationship between indigenous people and the state. Indigenous activists engaged nonindigenous authorities and institutions at the local level in contentious, cooperative, or competitive strategies of interest intermediation to redistribute assets, claim indigenous rights, and create coalitions committed to ethnic governance. These strategies involved various mechanisms including framing indigenous claims, mobilizing communities, and repurposing or revising existing institutions to help keep indigenous territories and communities together. The reforms opened new opportunities, and activists responded by sustaining contentious strategies of interest intermediation such as social protests and testing cooperative and competitive mechanisms to coordinate different jurisdictions, participate in local elections, build up broader constituencies, and increase coalitions to support indigenous rights. En la década de 1990, Colombia aprobó reformas multiculturales para abordar los derechos indígenas, pero procedió a ejercerlas de manera desigual. Paralelamente, las leyes de descentralización delegaron aspectos clave de la intermediación de intereses a los gobiernos locales. Estas reformas cambiaron la estructura de oportunidades políticas que enmarcaba la relación entre los pueblos indígenas y el Estado. Los activistas indígenas involucraron a autoridades e instituciones locales no indígenas en estrategias de intermediación de intereses contenciosas, cooperativas o competitivas para redistribuir activos, reclamar derechos indígenas y crear coaliciones comprometidas con la gobernanza étnica. Estas estrategias implicaron diversos mecanismos, entre ellos la formulación de reclamos indígenas, la movilización de las comunidades y la reutilización o revisión de las instituciones existentes para ayudar a mantener unidos los territorios y las comunidades indígenas. Las reformas dieron lugar a nuevas oportunidades, y los activistas respondieron sustentando estrategias contestatarias de intermediación de intereses, como protestas sociales, y probando mecanismos cooperativos y competitivos para coordinar distintas jurisdicciones, participar en elecciones locales, construir grupos más amplios y aumentar las coaliciones en apoyo a los derechos indígenas.

Politics Without Meso-Level? No Politics at the Meso?

The paper examines the role of meso-level governance in the Hungarian political system focusing on the county self-governments. The objective of the author is to introduce the consequences of the lack of meso-level politics for the backslide of the democratic system. The paper focusing on Hungarian counties seeks to explore the three-decade-long process leading to the progressive elimination of these bodies from the public power arena. The Hungarian case demonstrates how the overall administrative and political centralisation process has contributed to the hollowing-out of meso-level political actors. The Hungarian case study underlines the complex interrelations between the macro-political system, and the territorial political governmental arenas from the aspect of the centre and periphery power relations. Many European regional governments are not only platforms for territorial interest representation but also a counterweight to the central level contributing to the quality and stability of democratic governance. The study reviewing the situation of Hungarian counties draws on the author’s previous empirical research experiences and is a part of the ongoing research on governance issues of peripheral areas1. The results of the analyses discuss the implications of the hollowing-out of county governments on the electoral and party system, the modification of the institutional channels of interest representation. The Hungarian example appears to corroborate the analogy with the theory of second order elections. The theory of second order elections recognized the impact on the turnout and electoral preferences based on the changing role of different governance levels, by the same token, it seems that the weakening power position of the meso contributes to the decline of political competition and publicity by minimizing the interest of the public in general. The objective of the present study is to enrich the assessment of the relationship between territorial governance and democracy with some analytical options by demonstrating the implications of the “second order nature” of the meso.

Exploring Periodicity and Interactivity in Multi-Interest Framework for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation systems alleviate the problem of information overload, and have attracted increasing attention in the literature. Most prior works usually obtain an overall representation based on the user’s behavior sequence, which can not sufficiently reflect the multiple interests of the user. To this end, we propose a novel method called PIMI to mitigate this issue. PIMI can model the user’s multi-interest representation effectively by considering both the periodicity and interactivity in the item sequence. Specifically, we design a periodicity-aware module to utilize the time interval information between user’s behaviors. Meanwhile, an ingenious graph is proposed to enhance the interactivity between items in user’s behavior sequence, which can capture both global and local item features. Finally, a multi-interest extraction module is applied to describe user’s multiple interests based on the obtained item representation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets Amazon and Taobao show that PIMI outperforms state-of-the-art methods consistently.

Who needs lobbying? The usefulness of interest representation in the European Union from the European Commission's point of view

The article addresses issues related to the use of cooperation with lobbying groups for the European Commission. The main subject of the paper is the representation of interests in the European Union arena and the Commission’s exercise of its treaty competences. The analysis focuses on the use of expert knowledge and legitimacy provided by lobbying groups in the context of their usefulness in the process of fulfilling the Commission’s legal obligations. The arguments are classified into four groups: legislative, executive and supervisory, organisational, and legitimacy. In each of the groups, the Commission’s Treaty obligations are analysed, as well as the use of particular goods provided by lobbying groups in the course of their implementation, which allows to determine of the scope of benefits resulting from such cooperation. The purpose of this article is to examine the usefulness of lobbying in fulfilling the Commission’s Treaty functions.

After the ballot box: How explicit racist appeals damage constituents views of their representation in government

Recent scholarship finds that the use of explicit racial appeals can be an effective mobilization strategy in some situations. Consequently, U.S. politics has witnessed the resurgence of such appeals. Yet, the effects of racial appeals are not ensconced in electoral contexts, but may have potential downstream effects on interest representation and the ability for politicians to build broader coalitions This study uses a survey experiment to test the effect of exposure to racist comments used by a 2018 U.S. Senate candidate on perceived interest representation among Black and White respondents. The results show that Black and liberal White respondents who are exposed to these comments feel that the candidate is less able to represent their interests. Thus, we find that the use of explicit racial appeals potentially alienates a substantial proportion of people which could potentially lead to greater dissatisfaction with government.

The Impact of Host-states and Places Within Them on Diaspora Mobilizations

Closer focused on host-states in which diaspora entrepreneurs live, Chapter 10 presents a comparative discussion. The empirical chapters (4–9) have demonstrated that analysts cannot make clear-cut comparisons of host-states, unless considering a transnational social field perspective: the UK has been the hub for mobilization for Palestinians, France for Armenians, and Switzerland and Germany for Kosovo Albanians in Europe, apart from the US. The chapter argues that host-states are not to be treated as units of analysis for controlled comparisons but should be considered as contexts of embeddedness that empower diaspora entrepreneurs in specific ways. Such approach is in line with scholarly efforts to analyse beyond methodological nationalism. The chapter argues, while a diaspora entrepreneur’s contextual embeddedness is not powerful enough to explain the contentiousness of diaspora mobilizations, it shapes the socio-spatial positionality of individual diaspora entrepreneurs. The discussion focuses on three dimensions: migration incorporation regimes, systems of interest representation, and decentralization patterns of these host-states. Empirical evidence from the Albanian, Armenian, and Palestinian diasporas shows that diaspora entrepreneurs are shaped in their migrant integration experiences, engagement through federal vs unitary systems of states, with trade unions, host-land political parties, and protest politics. Also, certain places within these host-states, such as London and Sheffield in the UK, Berlin and Stuttgart in Germany, Malmö and Gothenburg in Sweden, The Hague in the Netherlands, Paris in France, and Zurich and Geneva in Switzerland, play an important role for diaspora mobilizations but do not explain their contentiousness.