"The European Commission has taken various initiatives to increase the participation of interest groups such as the White Paper on Governance or the Transparency Initiative (Kohler-Koch and Finke, 2007). Even though the Commission initiatives have provided broad access to a wide variety of interest groups, recent empirical evidence shows that the ability to exploit this access varies considerably across groups ... How can this be explained? Why are some interest groups able to influence policy-making in the European Union while others are not?" (Quoted from paper)