Europeanisation of Lithuanian Interest Groups and Its Determinants

Abstract

A variety of factors influence the degree to which national interest groups decide to transfer their competencies from national political arenas to the European Union level. Aiming to explain these differences the article proposes and tests several hypotheses, relating to groups’ organizational properties as well as their relationship with national authorities and opposing interest organizations. The empirical analysis is based on original survey of Lithuanian interest groups operating at a national level, carried out in 2016. The data reveals that organization’s decision to allocate more time to supranational level is very much based on its perceived relative power in the national interest group system. Europeanisation of Lithuanian interest groups is also highly dependent on its financial resources, policy field in which the group operates as well as membership in international or EU level organizations. Whereas group type and group’s domestic embeddedness, that is its relationships with national authorities, has no effect on Europeanising.