Strategies of Influence: How Interest Organizations React to Changes in Parliamentary Influence and Activity1

Abstract

Research has shown that interest organizations seeking influence on public decision making pay increasing attention to parliamentary actors. No distinction has, however, been made between attempts to affect law‐making directly and attempts to gain influence on other parliamentary activities such as agenda setting and control of bureaucracy. Drawing on data about organizational approaches to the Danish parliament, this article demonstrates that interest organizations’ influence strategies in relation to different parliamentary activities show dissimilar patterns. Strategies in regard to law‐making fluctuate with the strength of parliament vis‐à‐vis the government, while strategies concerned with more general parliamentary activities depend more on the level of these activities and secondarily on increases in parliamentary resources. The analysis thus confirms that organizations react to changes in the political role of parliament, but takes the understanding of this a step further by emphasizing that changes in direct parliamentary influence on law‐making and in more general parliamentary activities affect different aspects of organizations’ influence strategies.