Evelien Willems

• Doctor in Political Science
• PostDoc Position at University of Antwerp

This study examines the micro-level foundations of how policy responsiveness may come about. Our study builds on the assumption that elected officials' information source use shapes their policy actions. We analyze the variation in information sources elected officials rely on for agenda-setting and policy formulation, distinguishing between public...

This study examines interest groups’ influence on the European Commission’s policy agenda. We argue that organizations can gain agenda-setting influence by strategically emphasizing different types of information. Analyzing a novel dataset on the engagement of 158 interest groups across 65 policy issues, we find that prioritizing information about...

Despite the proliferation of studies on interest group influence, there has been limited research on the conditions that facilitate their ability to impact policy agendas. This study investigates the role of supportive alignments in enhancing interest groups’ agenda-setting influence, with a specific focus on the European Union. We argue that organ...

This note introduces flempar, an R-package designed to streamline data acquisition from the Flemish Parliament's open data API. flempar provides an interface that allows for easy extraction and linking of data, ranging from details of parliamentary proceedings to legislators' bibliographies. The package aims to reduce the complexity of navigating t...

This study adopts an issue-specific approach to explain interest groups’ media prominence. Contrary to the classic presumption that groups confronted with public opposition invariably manage to escape the public spotlight, the results—based on a news content analysis of 196 positions expressed by 68 Belgian groups on 56 issues—show that on salient...

This paper examines how public support affects interest groups’ advocacy success across three distinct stages in the legislative process. We hypothesize that public support is vital for advocacy success when coalition agreements are negotiated, has a weaker effect when legislation is introduced in parliament by the governing majority but becomes ag...

This chapter sets out to introduce the literature tackling the interplay between interest groups, public opinion, and public policy. Even after nearly 60 years of political science research, there is still much controversy concerning the involvement of interest groups in public policymaking and how lobbying might affect policy congruence and respon...

Interest Representation in Belgium This article assesses the size and diversity of Belgium’s interest group population by triangulating four data sources. Combining various sources allows us to describe which societal interests get mobilised, which interest organisations become politically active and who gains access to the policy process and obtai...

While many scholars have postulated the decline of membership influence as an important consequence of the professionalisation of civil society organisations (CSOs), other analysts have argued that traditional membership-driven CSOs are resilient and that hiring professionals does not necessarily diminish membership influence. This study sheds ligh...

Current scholarship often concludes that technical expertise is one of the most important commodities for interest groups wishing to gain access to political‐administrative venues. Less attention has been given to politicization and the scope of societal support that interest groups bring to bear. Specifically, I hypothesize that the capacity of in...

This article asks to what extent and under which conditions interest groups are congruent with public opinion. We argue that interest groups can be caught in a balancing act between engaging with their constituency on the one hand and aligning their position with the broader public on the other hand. We contribute to previous studies by arguing tha...

This article analyses how government funding affects the interactions interest organisations initiate with governments in a multi-level context. Governments rarely write blank checks, but rather specify eligibility and spending requirements when funding interest organisations. Our primary argument is that these requirements do not only impact organ...