The European Commission aims to tackle the climate crisis with the European Green Deal (EGD). To accomplish this task, the Commission requires expertise which interest groups are able to provide....Show moreThe European Commission aims to tackle the climate crisis with the European Green Deal (EGD). To accomplish this task, the Commission requires expertise which interest groups are able to provide. These groups which represent private and public interests provide information through lobbying and exert influence in the policy process. This paper provides insight into the private actors' lobbying strategies concerning the Green Deal. The theoretical frameworks that will be utilized to describe the lobby strategies are the access of interest groups in European policies through their expertise, the institutional framework of the EU and the policy issue characteristics. These frameworks are explained to provide a better understanding of the empirical findings. For the empirical research, qualitative content analysis will be applied to four energy private associations’ documents that are available in the public sphere. Finally, the findings will lead the study to argue that private associations are highly active in the policy process of the EGD and they apply informative lobbying to target the European Commission. Further research in the lobbying behaviour and influence of the energy sector in the implementation of the EGD is also suggested.Show less
Foreign aid policies vary greatly in their means and ends. Long-term development policies, aiming to promote development and welfare, distinguish from short-term humanitarian policies that respond...Show moreForeign aid policies vary greatly in their means and ends. Long-term development policies, aiming to promote development and welfare, distinguish from short-term humanitarian policies that respond to humanitarian emergency crises. Politicians seem to differ in their preferences, leading scholars to question how these preferences emerge. Existing literature has been focusing on theories of elite competition in explaining why states construct and implement certain policies. However, these theories seem to ignore the concept of political agency, and grant no primacy to the role of ideas and values. This thesis aims to fill this gap by asking how party ideologies influence foreign aid policy preferences. It employs the discursive legitimation model of Van Leeuwen (2008) to analyze Dutch parliamentary debates. Here, it is found that conservative values affect politicians to refer to authorization and rationalization when legitimizing their preferences, while liberal values work through to moral evaluation and story-telling strategies. This confirms that ideas and ideologies do matter for policy preferences.Show less
