Unit Thee The role of political parties and interest groups in the representation of interests

STEP 3. THE INTEREST GROUPS

As there is not yet a genuine transnational party system at the EU level, interest groups play an important role in European arena and in the EU representative sub-system. Unlike political groups, interest groups carry out their activity not through electoral competition, but through lobbying, i.e. the activity of trying to persuade and influence political authorities in Brussels in order to advance the interests of the group and its members. For this purpose, they are made by professionals seeking to identify ‘access points’ to European institutions.

To have a preliminary understanding of these processes, look at this short video: