Interest Group Behavior Research Articles

Lobbying transparency and attitudes towards interest groups: a survey experiment

AbstractDespite the growing interest for lobbying in public opinion research, little is known about citizen’s attitudes towards interest groups, especially after legislation making lobbying transparent is passed. Using data from a pre-registered survey experiment conducted with a panel of 569 participants from the Republic of Ireland, this study shows that when exposed to information about lobbying conducted by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and business organisations, citizens do not improve their evaluations of interest groups. Surprisingly, against the general expectations found in the transparency literature, information about lobbying does not trigger positive changes in attitudes. A post hoc analysis of the participants’ reactions to the transparency treatment reveals that citizens may have little interest or understanding of political activities such as lobbying. The study, however, also reveals that lobbying transparency does not backfire producing unexpected negative effects. This adds a new perspective to the recent debate on how public opinion responds to interest group behaviour.

The politics of anger: emotional appraisal mechanisms and the French pension reform protests

In this article, using the French pension reform in 2020 as a case, we demonstrate how a focus on emotions helps us to better understand important policy dynamics. While existing approaches of welfare state reform typically focus on rational-materialist and institutionalist approaches, we use appraisal theory of emotion to explain how the reform project and process on the one hand and interest group behaviour and protest on the other are linked via a mechanism of anger. Material interests of different groups of citizens and trade unions clearly matter, but they cannot sufficiently explain the process through which disagreement could erupt in one of the largest and longest protest movements in recent French history. Theoretically integrating material interests and moral reasoning and using a variety of qualitative and public opinion data, we trace the escalation of conflict between key actors which ultimately impeded a comprehensive reform in 2020. Our findings have important implications for research on the role of emotions in policymaking.

Policy and constituency frames in the advocacy of political parties and interest groups in policy-making

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a theoretical perspective for the comparative analysis of the advocacy behavior of political parties and interest groups in legislative policy-making. It conceptualizes the policy-centered and group-centered statements of political actors as policy frames and constituency frames, respectively. In order to gauge the analytical leverage provided by policy and constituency frames, I will theorize the extent to which political parties and interest groups rely on these two types of frames respectively. The empirical relevance of both types of frames is assessed in two cases of legislative policy-making in Germany. Drawing on parliamentary debates, position papers presented in committee hearings, and press statements released by interest groups, I show, amongst others, that constituency frames play a significant role in these actors’ advocacy. While the use of policy and constituency frames varies between radical and moderate parties, there are hardly any differences in their use between parties and interest groups.

How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador

ABSTRACT How does the coordination strategy of interest groups change during a crisis? Shocks reduce an economy's resource pool and increase the competition for what is available. Interest groups participate in the policy-making process by lobbying legislators. In times of crisis, we argue, interest groups lobbying Congress coordinate in cohesive industry-wide communities led by key actors. Rather than lobbying for narrow policy privileges, interest groups seek to support legislation that is most beneficial to their community. To study the cooperative behaviour of interest groups we build an original network dataset based on committee participation in the Ecuadorian Congress between 1996 and 2015. We present evidence of increasingly homophilic industry networks in times of crisis, with umbrella organisations taking the role of hubs. We find that ‘lone wolf’ strategies, prevalent during an economic expansion, are less prevalent during a crisis.

Persuading the independent: understanding why interest groups engage with EU agencies

What motivates interest groups to engage with European Union (EU) agencies? Authors have recently looked into the interaction between interest groups and these European regulators. This article sets out to discover new explanations for interest group behaviour and to add mechanisms to established explanatory factors by looking at this novel context for interest group literature. It employs an in-depth qualitative study using interviews with high-level interest group representatives that interact with the European Food Safety Authority. A novel finding is that interest groups, specifically business actors, are motivated by preventing reputational threats to the agency. This article, therefore, extends insights from bureaucratic reputation literature to interest group scholarship. Furthermore, interest groups are motivated by factors found in interest group literature such as influence on regulatory policy, gaining access to venues and appeasing their members. This article aids future research efforts in unravelling why interest groups engage with EU regulatory agencies.

The tip of the iceberg – interest group behaviour in rule drafting and consultations during EU agency rulemaking

ABSTRACT Public consultations are used by regulatory agencies for input into their decisions and provide an opportunity for interest groups to voice their concerns. However, researchers emphasised that interest groups are also active before consultations, when drafting regulatory rules. Public consultations might be the tip of the iceberg, with influence during early rule drafting stages looming beneath the surface. This paper looks into interest group behaviour during rulemaking by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Combining datasets on interest group access to rule drafting workshops (N = 538) and interest group behaviour in consultations (N = 42,595), the paper assesses what those that help draft rules do during public consultations. Strikingly, only a minority of these groups participate in consultations afterwards. Those that do participate, however, make active attempts to change regulation. These findings do not differ for different interest group types or at different levels of salience. Public consultations are therefore actively used by insiders, emphasising their importance for providing input in the rulemaking process. However, as many of those that draft rules do not participate in public consultations, the impact of many vital interest groups exists beneath the surface.

Data and methods for analyzing special interest influence in rulemaking

The US government creates astonishingly complete records of policy creation in executive agencies. In this article, we describe the major kinds of data that have proven useful to scholars studying interest group behavior and influence in bureaucratic politics, how to obtain them, and challenges that we as users have encountered in working with these data. We discuss established databases such as regulations.gov, which contains comments on draft agency rules, and newer sources of data, such as ex-parte meeting logs, which describe the interest groups and individual lobbyists that bureaucrats are meeting face-to-face about proposed policies. One challenge is that much of these data are not machine-readable. We argue that scholars should invest in several projects to make these datasets machine-readable and to link them to each other as well as to other databases.

Sustainable natural resource governance under interest group competition in policy-making.

Non-state actors play an increasingly important role in environmental policy. Lobbying by interest groups has been associated with policy stagnation and environmental degradation as well as with sustainable governance. However, little is known about how competition between economic and environmental interests influences the ability of governance systems to avoid undesirable outcomes. We investigate how competing interest group behaviour affects sustainable resource management by tracing the policy change process in a case study of the European Union fisheries policy and analysing its dynamics with an agent-based model. We find that formation of interest group coalitions in response to a perceived crisis can delay or prevent collapses, even when the competing interests have unequal resources. We attribute such outcomes to the emergence and timing of a 'tug of war' mechanism between competing interest group coalitions. We argue that attempts to improve sustainable resource management must account for feedbacks from environmental change to behaviours of political actors.

Using the Comparative Agendas Project to examine interest group behavior

The rapid expansion of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has drastically increased data availability on the policy agendas of government outputs. These data are coded using a system to allow for valid comparisons in policy agendas across issues, time, and systems. However, less data are available for interest groups outputs, and that data have mostly been limited to the USA. In this paper, we propose methods for measuring the policy agendas of interest groups using the CAP system. Scholars can estimate the policy content of interest group activities by linking them to existing CAP datasets. These data can be used to compare the distribution of policy attention of interest groups and the institutions they attempt to influence. Because the CAP datasets are highly detailed and widely available, researchers can examine interest group activities at low costs. Furthermore, we discuss higher-cost methods of coding interest group policy outputs that may be of interest to scholars.

Large-N bill positions data from MapLight.org: What can we learn from interest groups’ publicly observable legislative positions?

The transparency organization MapLight records instances of organizations taking positions for and against legislation in Congress. The dataset comprises some 130,000 such positions taken on thousands of bills between the 109th and 115th Congresses (2005–2018). The depth and breadth of these data potentially give them wide applicability for answering questions about interest group behavior and influence as well as legislative politics more broadly. However, the coverage and content of the data are affected by aspects of MapLight’s research process. This article introduces the MapLight dataset and its potential uses, examines issues related to sampling and other aspects of MapLight’s research process, and explains how scholars can address these to make appropriate use of the data.

An Index of Mediatisation: Comparing Interest Groups’ Political Communication Behaviour

This article investigates the political communication behaviour of interest groups. First, by proposing indices to capture the degree to which mass media have become central for political communication (media logic of communication), and the degree to which conventional strategies aimed at politicians directly govern groups’ communication behaviour (political logic of communication). Based on these two indices, the article then proposes an overall index of mediatisation. Second, the article tests three hypotheses regarding the use of the media logic, the political logic, and the mediatisation of interest groups, and finds that group type, resources, and the level of competition all play a role for how strongly interest groups are mediatized. Thus, this article contributes to the scarce empirical research on mediatisation by a) proposing a way to operationalise this concept which can be adjusted using a different set of variables, but can also be applied for different political actors, and b) by showing the usefulness of the constructed indices in an empirical example for Swiss and German interest groups.

Determinants of water lobbying: irrigators' behavior in a water-stressed basin

Abstract The design and implementation of water policies to address scarcity problems are largely shaped by the behavior of interest groups and their ability to influence policymakers. Different and opposed interests of stakeholders regarding policies trigger water conflicts and, frequently, lead to the failure of the implemented regulation. Departing from political economy theory, we empirically estimate the determinants that affect the level of lobbying effort and effectiveness by water interest groups for influencing water policy. The findings are based on data collected by a survey administered among different irrigators' groups, in a water-stressed river basin (the Jucar River Basin in Spain) that vie to increase their water allocations. Our results demonstrate how lobbying effort depends on the involvement of the interest groups, the energies exerted to sway water authorities, and on the variation among the group members. Lobbying effectiveness is a function of the effort exerted. Furthermore, both functions depend on the intrinsic characteristics of the group's members. While the empirical results corroborate several main statements of the theory of lobbying and interest groups, some deviations based on the empirical application remain.

Counterbalancing the disadvantages of the “Have Nots”: an examination of the impact of amicus participation in state supreme court cases

Party capability theory posits that litigation success is predicated on litigants’ experience as parties to lawsuits as well as their access to resources. The stakes are particularly high for disadvantaged litigants in asymmetric power relationships, such as those between government (“The Haves”) and criminal defendants (“The Have Nots”). Scholars have found that interest group participation via amicus curiae—or “friend of the court”—briefs can reduce litigant power disparities in federal appellate cases, but it remains unclear whether the same holds in criminal matters before courts of last resort. As a starting point to understanding interest group behavior in state supreme court criminal cases, this study examines party capability theory and the extent to which, if any, amicus participation affects decision making that favors the government. Findings underscore the importance of interest group participation that supports disadvantaged litigants and the impact crime severity has on outcomes in criminal state supreme court cases.

The effects of decentralization on special interest groups

It is well established in the literature that the number of interest group organizations varies across countries and states, with economic freedom and other institutional factors playing important roles in economic growth and prosperity. At the same time, the literature offers little empirical evidence of the influence of institutions on interest group behavior. This study presents new evidence on the extent to which institutional structure, in particular state and local governmental fiscal decentralization, promotes or hinders interest group formation. Expenditure decentralization, more so than revenue decentralization, appears to constrain the number of industry-type groups while having little effect on social-type groups in US states. The results provide further evidence of the importance of institutional quality and structure across states and suggest important directions for future research.

Blue Endorsements Matter: How the Fraternal Order of Police Contributed to Donald Trump’s Victory

ABSTRACTConventional accounts of Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral victory stress idiosyncratic events and media celebrity because most observers assume this unusual candidate won without much organized support. However, considerable evidence suggests that the support of conservative organizational networks, including police unions such as the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), propelled Trump to victory. The FOP is both a public-sector union and a conservative, mass-membership fraternal association that was courted by the Trump campaign at a time of politically charged debates about policing. Four years before, the FOP had refused to endorse Republican candidate Mitt Romney because he opposed public-sector unionism, which provided fruitful and rare variation in interest-group behavior across electoral cycles. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that FOP lodge density contributed to a significant swing in vote share from Romney to Trump. Moreover, survey evidence indicates that police officers reported increased political engagement in 2016 versus 2012. Belying the notion that Trump lacked a “ground game,” this research suggests that he tapped into existing organizational networks, showing their enduring importance in electoral politics.

Impossible Politics? PCORI and the Search for Publicly Funded Comparative Effectiveness Research in the United States

Abstract Congress created the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to fund comparative effectiveness research without encroaching on health care decision making in the private sector. This study asked if the organization's design is sufficient to insulate it from the hostile political environment that accompanied past comparative effectiveness research efforts. Data for the study came from key informant interviews, stakeholder interviews, content analysis of public comments, congressional hearings, and media and Internet content about PCORI. Drawing on theoretical frameworks of interest group behavior, the study assessed current and potential future stakeholder activity directed toward PCORI. The study found that PCORI's leadership has successfully mobilized patients and researchers in support of its mission. However, patient groups tend to mobilize within rather than across disease categories, limiting the collective impact these groups might have. Moreover, PCORI's success in including the patient voice in every stage of the research process has created only diffuse support for the organization. A lack of “practice-changing” findings—likely the result of the organization's interest group environment—leaves PCORI open to the criticism of ineffectiveness.

Donors for democracy? Philanthropy and the challenges facing America in the twenty-first century

After the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, a self-defined “resistance” movement arose to block his agenda. This movement cut across the normal boundaries of political activism to create new forms of advocacy and new models of cooperation. Major components of the resistance were ideological interest groups, women’s organizations, environmentalists, heretofore disengaged Millennials, racial and ethnic groups, community nonprofits, and, ostensibly, foundations and leading philanthropists—those we term “patrons.” We systematically examine the behavior of patrons to determine what role they played at this unique time in American history. We place this research in the context of interest group behavior, asking how patrons may have facilitated representation, altered strategic plans, reoriented advocacy, and repositioned themselves within policy communities supporting similar goals. Our findings undermine the idea that patrons played a central role in the developing resistance to the new administration, despite the fact that the new president was working against their values and the programs they support. However, a non-trivial minority of patrons, both institutional and individual, did mobilize their voice, institutional resources, and coalitions to resist the Trump agenda. These examples allow us to explore how patrons in some conditions might fulfill the roles of interest groups conventionally understood.

The Point of No Return? Interest Groups, School Board Elections, and the Sustainment of the Portfolio Management Model in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Context Given the growing popularity of the portfolio management model (PMM) as a method of improving education, it is important to examine how these market-based reforms are sustained over time and how the politics of sustaining this model have substantial policy implications. Purpose of Study The purpose of this article is to examine important patterns and trends in the relationship between campaign contributions to local and state school board elections and the sustainability of the PMM in urban districts. We provide a descriptive analysis of the role of interest groups in education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans and document how the PMM changed the landscape of education politics, with a focus on the actors, both local and national, that sustain the PMM. Research Design We describe the creation of Act 35 and the evolution of educational governance changes in New Orleans to determine whether the same interest groups that played a role in the origin of the PMM also contributed to its sustainment. We analyze how these educational governance changes influenced the politics of education reform using data from the Louisiana Ethics Commission on campaign contributions to both state and local school board elections. We apply several non-board and board governance theories to examine interest group behavior. We also conduct interviews with stakeholders throughout the educational system to inform our discussion of the evolution of educational governance and the politics of education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, as well as the categorization of candidates in school board elections. Results We find that in the post-Katrina era, there was a diversification of actors in the interest group landscape. These groups influenced educational governance through unprecedented levels of campaign contributions to the state and local school board elections. The influence of interest groups, especially out- of- state actors, contributed to an emerging shift in political control from “traditional” school board candidates to an increase in “pro-reform” board members. Conclusions The PMM is accompanied by heightened interest as well as an influx of out-of-state actors in educational policy making and the provision of public education. Unprecedented levels of campaign contributions suggest that state and local school board elections may be one of the primary mechanisms through which interest groups influenced post-Katrina educational governance. Out-of-state campaign contributions were mostly in support of pro-portfolio candidates. There appears to be tangible national support for the PMM that may play a crucial role in sustaining these reforms.

Property Taxes for Agriculture: Use-Value Assessment and Urbanization Across the United States

We analyze the spread of use-value assessment (UVA) programs applied to agricultural and rural land for property tax purposes across the 50 states. Taxing such land on the basis of its current use in agriculture rather than its full market value can confer significant property tax reductions on owners of the land. Effects are often substantial for land near large urban areas. Using a time-to-event model, we find, as others have posited, that a driving force behind the spread of UVA has been the secular trend toward urbanization across all 50 states. We also find that models of collective action do a good job of explaining the spread of UVA. Urbanization and divergence of the values of agricultural and nonagricultural land are critical to the spread of UVA. However, other important factors include changes in average farm size and changes in agriculture's share of state income. We find that in states where average farm sizes increased more rapidly, legislatures were quicker to adopt UVA. That finding is consistent with an increased concentration of agricultural interests. We also find that states where agriculture's share of state income declined more rapidly also were quicker to adopt UVA. That finding, too, is consistent with models of collective action. As groups become smaller, the burden of subsidizing them also falls. Note that although the findings are consistent with models of interest group behavior, they are at odds with traditional voting models.

Interest group perceptions on water policy reforms: insight from a water-stressed basin

Abstract Water policies have been implemented worldwide to face water stress. However, the existence of water users' groups with opposite interests and different political power results in the plain failure or low effectiveness of water policy reforms. A better understanding of users' perceptions regarding policy outcomes is important to avoid the failure of water policies and the intensification of water conflicts. This paper empirically examines the divergent perception of interest groups on the implementation of different policies dealing with water scarcity and their proactive involvement with water agencies. We have conducted a survey in the Jucar River Basin (a water-stressed basin in southeastern Spain) to analyze interest group opinions regarding water policy effectiveness and water institutions' performance in water management. Questionnaires were sent to the main irrigation districts and urban water utilities within the basin. The collected information gives a general picture of the behavior of opposite water interest groups in this basin. The analysis of the perceptions on water policy reform between the groups highlights the existence of significant differences between preferred measures to address water scarcity and lobbying capacity. These differences depend on the size of the group, the specific basin location, and other group characteristics.