Whose Preferences Align With EU Law? Interest Group Representation, Linguistic Inequality and Semantic Alignment across the EU Legislative Chain

Abstract Understanding how organised interests' stated positions correspond to EU legislation requires moving beyond end‐point measures of preference attainment towards a process‐oriented account of how policy‐position alignment evolves across institutional stages. This study conceptualises semantic alignment as the extent to which an actor's three‐dimensional policy‐position profile corresponds to successive EU institutional texts. This study draws on a corpus of approximately 4800 consultation submissions across three major legislative dossiers: the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Artificial Intelligence Act and the Critical Raw Materials Act. We use a multilingual agentic large language model framework to retrieve relevant passages, extract positions on regulatory stringency, governance centralisation, crisis urgency and compute stage‐specific alignment with the European Commission, the Council of the EU and the European Parliament. Given that the analysis is observational and text based, the resulting scores capture semantic alignment and preference attainment rather than causal influence. Four findings emerge. First, semantic alignment is more strongly associated with final preference attainment than textual similarity. Second, preference attainment varies across stages: civil society submissions show their highest alignment at the agenda‐setting stage, whilst business actors display comparatively flatter alignment profiles across institutions. Third, non‐English submissions achieve significantly lower alignment, revealing systematic linguistic inequality in EU consultation processes. Fourth, crisis framing is more strongly associated with alignment in high‐uncertainty contexts than in stable policy environments. Together, these findings offer a process‐oriented, computationally scalable and cross‐linguistically sensitive account of how organised‐interest positions correspond to European integration outcomes.