The panel chairs and discussants in our standing group’s section of the 2022 ECPR General Conference put forward nominations for the best junior and senior papers. This was followed by an evaluation and discussion among three jury members. We are very grateful to Ellis Aizenberg; Adrià Albareda and Rafael Pablo Labanino for putting time and effort in evaluating the shortlisted papers.

The jury unanimously chose the paper titled “Is Virtue Its Own Reward? Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to British Policymakers”  by Alvise Favotto, Kelly Kollman and Fraser McMillan for best paper award. The jury praises the paper’s innovative and impressive examination of the role that businesses and trade associations play in UK policymaking processes and the effect of organizational reputation and CSR in the relations between business and policymakers. The authors use a rich quantitative data-set complemented with qualitative interviews, strengthening the validity and reliability of their findings. Overall, the paper adds a novel interdisciplinary view to the literature which is at the frontiers of the interest group field.

The jury unanimously chose the paper titled “Citizens as Stakeholders in Consultations: Understanding the Amount of Citizen Participation in the European Commission’s Consultation Regime” by Idunn Nørbech for Junior prize. The jury praises the paper’s carefully designed quantitative analysis and interdisciplinary approach by bringing together the literature on citizen’s and interest group participation in EU policymaking.