Mechanisms of Responsiveness: What MPs Think of Interest Organizations and How They Deal with Them

Marco Giugni,Maria Grasso

doi:10.1177/0032321718784156

Marco Giugni, Maria Grasso

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718784156

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Abstract

By employing individual-level data on MPs in 15 countries and 73 national and local assemblies, this article examines the conditions under which individual MPs are responsive to interest organizations. We show that MPs’ political values influence their responsiveness: MPs with more egalitarian and socially open values are more responsive to interest organizations. Moreover, MPs’ conceptions of democracy also matter in that more negative views of popular political involvement in democratic decision making are linked to lower responsiveness to interest organizations. Reliance on established ties with groups in society as well as support for technocracy have differential effects for responsiveness toward “old” and “new” interest organizations characterized by diverse social bases. These findings have important implications for democratic practice since they show how MPs are not all equally responsive to organized citizens as well as how different types of factors matter for responsiveness to “old” and “new” types of interest organizations.

Highlights

Citizens routinely organize collectively to influence political representatives (Giugni and Grasso, in press)
We aim to contribute to redressing this state of affairs by examining the following research question: What are the individual-level mechanisms underlying MPs’ responsiveness to interest organizations? To answer this question, we focus on various characteristics of MPs and examine the responsiveness of politicians to interest organizations from an individual-level perspective
Inspired by the results of these rare individual-level studies looking at political elite responses to social movements and perceptions of effective political activism, we develop new theorizing with respect to how responsiveness toward interest organizations at the individual level is more likely to be activated depending on certain characteristics of MPs

Summary

Introduction

Citizens routinely organize collectively to influence political representatives (Giugni and Grasso, in press). Moving on to testing for H5, we find that with MPs with more positive view of citizens’ involvement are more likely to say that it is desirable to involve interest groups in decision making as well as reporting higher contact regularity on the general measure and with the two “new” types of organizations (women and environmental) This confirms our fifth hypothesis and shows that MP responsiveness is closely linked to how positively they view citizen involvement in politics and, as such, that responsiveness to. It is important to note that the effects we found above for our variables of interest are net of the effect of the party position of MPs as well as of their being members of a party in government rather that in opposition Those MPs who are more left-libertarian, who have more positive views of popular citizen political involvement, or who are more supportive of greater technocratic involvement are more likely to be responsive to interest organizations, depending on the specific indicator we focus upon

Discussion and Conclusion

Responsiveness to “new” types of organizations will be less closely

Findings

The number of respondents in each country is the following