The paper will address the question of the extent to which there is any sort of congruence between the preferences of different types of interest groups and the member states (within the Council) and the EP with regards to EU environmental policy-making. Thus, this paper analyzes in a systematic way the extent to which formal actors (Council and EP) include the preferences of a different range of informal actors (interest groups) in the negotiation and decision-making of EU environmental legislative proposals. This will be the first research question of the paper. The second one will be why this is so. In other words, the goals of the paper will be to identify the extent to which there is a matching of preferences between different sorts of interest groups and formal actors in EU policy-making as well as to study the explanatory mechanisms behind the influence of interest groups on both the European Council and the European Parliament.

This work builds upon previous conclusions that ´some interest groups are more successful than others in translating their preferences into policy outputs at the EU level` (Bunea 2013). Previous research has been more focused on how successful interest groups were in the EU policy-making rather than in the mechanisms that explain the influence of interest groups within the European Council and the European Parliament. In contrast to previous studies, this research will be focused on the impact of interest groups on member states and EP bargaining position, independently of the how successful they were in the final decision process. This is a relevant distinction insofar a particular interest group might be very successful when influencing a particular member state or even the EP but rather unsuccessful when influencing the final decision and the other way around. Therefore, this research will provide a more nuanced and substantive research than previous studies about EU environmental policy-making.

The present study will introduce three relevant innovations with respect to previous work. First, it focuses on the EU environmental decision-making process in a sequential way. Our analysis will start once the proposal has been introduced by the European Commission. Second, it systematically examines which interest groups succeed in the EU decision-making across a variety of environmental issues and why (prior to the decision stage). This offers previously unavailable detail about the mechanisms and level of success used by interest groups to influence formal actors. Finally, this study will use recent and first-hand data about the preferences (as well as other key analytical variables) of interest groups, member states and the EP. This is part of the DEU III data set which is being collected currently.