Interest groups and agenda-setting styles

Abstract

Students of public policy have rightly spent considerable effort setting out the types of policy instruments or tools available to policy makers, the way these are packaged up, and the comparative effectiveness of combinations. Recent work has extended the policy tools framework beyond a more or less exclusive focus on implementation to other stages of the policy cycle. One nascent strand of this important work concerns the agenda-setting phase, where scholars aim to understand the instruments – procedural and structural – that government uses to shape the issues that it has to address (in terms of both volume and content). For scholars of organised interests this debate holds particular relevance, given that groups are one of the primary agents charged with making policy demands. Yet there has been little engagement between scholarship on interest groups and this ongoing discussion around agenda-setting tools. This chapter probes agenda setting from the interest group perspective. It identifies the range of drivers that shape decisions by groups to prioritise issues onto their lobbying agendas. It then unpacks four dimensions of interest group agendas, and ultimately identifies ideal-type agenda-setting styles.