Interest Group System Research Articles

New Kids on the Democracy Block: Europeanisation of Interest Groups in Central and Eastern Europe

The 2004 EU enlargement and related Europeanisation processes supported the development of stagnated interest group systems in many ways, including with respect to the professionalisation of mainly voluntary-based organisations in Central and Eastern Europe. In the pre-membership period and initial years after joining the EU, national interest groups from Central and Eastern Europe chiefly relied on EU-level interest groups for important information, knowledge, and know-how concerning EU policymaking, whereas 20 years of membership has today established them as equal partners and co-decision-makers. The article elaborates on the Europeanisation of interest groups in the Central and Eastern Europe region from the start of the process of accession to the EU, with three case studies in focus: Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia. The main research question is: In which different ways has the Europeanisation process influenced interest groups in the region? To address it, the article builds on Johansson and Jacobsson’s (2016) typology of the Europeanisation of interest groups. Six exploratory factors were examined in this regard: (a) contacts with EU policymakers and institutions, (b) interest in EU policymaking, (c) funding received from EU projects and programmes, (d) networking with EU umbrella organisations, (e) participation in open consultations, and (f) the relationship of the group with members. To study the effects of Europeanisation processes in selected countries, web survey data gathered from national interest groups as part of the Comparative Interest Groups Survey project were used. Our results show that interest groups from Central and Eastern Europe have become “European” in a range of ways. Regulatory and discursive Europeanisation is most typical for Polish interest groups, identity Europeanisation for Lithuanian interest groups, and financial and participatory Europeanisation for Lithuanian and Polish interest groups, while organisational Europeanisation has the strongest effect on interest groups in Slovenia.

Challenging the insider outsider approach to advocacy: how collaboration networks and belief similarities shape strategy choices

Advocacy strategies are a key success factor for public, private and third sector actors who participate in and seek to influence policy choices. Despite this, research on policy networks has paid little attention to the forms of advocacy studied by interest groups scholars. The interest groups’ literature differentiates insider from outsider strategies and assumes that interest groups with strong access to policymakers opt for insider strategies, while those with weak access are constrained to the use of outsider strategies. This literature has not considered how the full set of actors that constitute a policy network use advocacy strategies. Furthermore, the insider/outsider dichotomy oversimplifies and neglects the possibility that actors’ choices are interdependent. Using climate change policy network data from four countries that vary by interest group system, we investigate if policy actors’ choices of advocacy strategies are similar to those in their collaboration network and to those with similar policy beliefs as their own. Results show that, irrespective of the context, actors are likely to use the same advocacy strategies as their collaboration partners and those whose policy beliefs are like their own. This research demonstrates the value of using a policy network approach to move beyond the insider/outsider dichotomy on interest groups’ use of advocacy strategies. It makes a clear contribution to this scholarship by advancing the debate on strategies that policy actors employ to influence policymaking through evidencing interdependencies between the strategies used by policy actors due to belief similarity and a ‘networking effect’.

Kinder, gentler – and crisis-proof? Consensus democracy, inclusive institutions and COVID-19 pandemic performance

Which patterns of democracy perform best? Although a decades-long research tradition has fairly robustly suggested that consensual democracies outperform their Westminster-style majoritarian counterparts, the scope of previous studies has been limited to ‘normal times’. In this article, the endogenous context of the COVID-19 pandemic is leveraged to study whether the alleged superiority of consensualism also holds during crises. It is hypothesised that, in addition to consensus democracy, inclusive institutions – i.e. cabinet size and interest-group corporatism – enhance crisis-related performance. Drawing on new and original data, cross-sectional and hierarchical time-series regression analyses show that horizontal power-sharing and the number of ministers substantively reduced excess mortality, while the structure of the interest-group system had no effect. Although established consensus democracies can draw on their built-in institutional assets even during crises, our findings indicate that majoritarian systems may, as a compensatory performance-enhancing tool, flexibly gear up for crisis-induced necessities by adding more ministers to the cabinet.

The Representative Potential of Interest Groups: Internal Voice in Post-Communist and Western European Countries

Why do some interest group systems provide group members with more elaborate voice opportunities than other systems? We argue that evaluating membership voice is important for understanding the representative potential of interest group systems. An adequate understanding of “voice” forms the basis of “context”-embedded assessments of benchmarks such as interest group bias, interest group representational distortion, and interest group-driven policy overload. We examine two competing hypotheses on the differences in internal voice in Eastern and Western Europe. Primarily, case-specific arguments lead us to expect a weaker internal voice in post-communist Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe. Conversely, some theoretical approaches, such as population ecological organisational theory, lead us to expect a relatively weak membership voice in the organisationally saturated Western European systems. We assess these two hypotheses on the basis of an international survey of interest group leaders and observe, in line with the population ecological hypothesis, that members of Western European interest groups, compared to those in post-communist countries, are perceived as having less influential voices in internal decisions on policy positions. We conclude, neither optimistically nor pessimistically, that there is a meaningful representative potential of interest group systems supporting democratic societies, also, or even especially, in the post-communist countries studied.

Challenges Facing Organised Interests Under a Populist Right-Wing Government in Slovenia

The development of organised interests (OIs) during the socialist period in Central and Eastern Europe was considerably limited, if not frozen. This was also somewhat the case in Slovenia, where it was mainly OIs close to the government that could operate. In the early 1990s, the interest group system in the now independent country was already recognised as vibrant with the number of OIs growing each year ever since. Yet, Europeanisation processes in particular have led to additional opportunity structures being created for OIs to become involved in policymaking. The biggest obstacle to the development of such interests has become the low level of its professionalisation, given that most are run voluntarily. Around the end of 2020, the political environment for the activities of OIs remained quite favourable, with a few isolated drops in their public image and political attacks on mostly environmental organisations. The change in government in March 2020 saw the backsliding in democracy become more apparent. This included liberal OIs being publicly discredited, the obstruction of largely environmental OIs, and attacks on the media. In this article, we examine how democratic backsliding in Slovenia has affected the articulation, representation, and intermediation of interests. To unravel this puzzle, we analyse the changing conditions for OIs’ operations between March 2020 and April 2022 as introduced by the populist right-wing Slovenian government to help better understand the democratic backsliding seen in the country.

Recent Developments in Interest Group Activity in the Northeastern States

This article uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the contemporary interest group systems of eleven Northeastern states and compares these with the interest group systems in the fifty states as a whole. It is found that recent changes in the socio-economic and political life of the Northeast have affected surface aspects of the region's interest group systems, such as the range of groups represented and the styles of representation, and has extended power to some new interests to an extent greater than in any other region of the nation. However, recent changes have not altered the fundamental dominance of the policy process by traditional economic and institutional interests which enjoy a marked advantage in the possession of the resources necessary for political influence. The findings from the research also call into question existing theories of an inverse relalionship between group power and (1) socio-economic development, (2) government professionalism, and (3) political party power in the Northeast and the states as a whole.

Business and Politics in the United States

AbstractAmerican business enjoys significant advantages in politics, including a generally sympathetic culture, the loyal support of most Republicans, dominance of the interest group system and favourable incentives in the US political economy. However, these advantages are not as clear‐cut as is often imagined and are more likely to be used by corporations against each other than in defence of general business interests.

Exploring the domestic and international drivers of professionalization of Central and Eastern European interest groups

AbstractWhile there has been a veritable boom in literature on organized interests, their lobbying strategies, relationships with decision-makers, and their impact on policymaking, only a few studies have explored internal organizational developments and, specifically, the professionalization of interest groups. The present study focuses on the national and transnational factors driving the professionalization of interest groups in Central and Eastern Europe, a region previously neglected in much of the interest group literature. Based on a sample of more than 400 surveyed organizations operating in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia in the healthcare, higher education, and energy sectors, we explore three bundles of factors potentially enhancing the professionalization of interest groups – organizational funding sources, national and transnational intergroup cooperation and organizations’ standing in the domestic interest group system. Our statistical analyses show that state subsidies and tight policy coordination with the state are crucial drivers of internal organizational professionalization, suggesting rather patronistic and symbiotic relationships between the state and certain organizations. However, our data also support the notion that interorganizational collaboration, both at the national and international levels, may also be key to organizational professionalization, enabling groups that lack close ties with the state to compensate their disadvantage with intensive domestic and international networking. The study is also among the first to link increasing professionalization with organizational population density.

The Varying Mechanisms of Media Access: Explaining Interest Groups’ Media Visibility across Political Systems

A growing body of studies analyzes interest groups’ media visibility. Yet little is known about how the drivers of media access may vary across different interest group systems. This article focuses on two major mechanisms through which organizations can gain media visibility: media management efforts and the newsworthiness of elite actors. We hypothesize that media effort explains interest groups’ media access more strongly in competitive, pluralist interest group systems and that insider (i.e. “elite”) status does so more strongly in hierarchical, corporatist systems. We analyze surveys and media data on interest groups in the pluralist United Kingdom, the moderately corporatist Denmark, and the more strongly corporatist Finland. As hypothesized, media effort is most effective in the UK and weakest in Finland. However, we find only weak support for the insider status hypothesis: there is some evidence of the expected cross-country differences, but the effects are small and unrobust.

Changing state interest group systems: replicating and extending the ESA model

Changing state interest group systems: replicating and extending the ESA model

Looking for ‘Voice’ in Business and Citizen Groups: Who’s Being Heard?

Why do some associations provide members with an effective voice whereas others appear to have internal democracy in name only? We theoretically combine population ecology with Hirschman’s strategic response model. This leads us to hypothesize that in dense, competitive organizational environments, the effective alternatives available make it likely that dissatisfied members respond with exit rather than voice. However, in low-dense, monopoly-like situations dissatisfied members demand and receive effective voice options. We further hypothesize that the particular sets of incentives of firms and individuals as members moderates this effect. We assess our argument on the basis of the Comparative Interest Group elite survey among interest group leaders in five European countries and at the EU level. We control for the level of professionalization and use country dummies to identify country-level differences. We find strong empirical support for our theoretical argument. The contribution of this article is to theoretically connect macro-level population-level factors to micro-level intra-organizational processes and specifies the nature of the organizational link between interests in society and those represented in the interest group system.

How pandemic has influenced the game between interest groups and politics. A theoretical Model

When parties and interest groups interact, they can do so in several ways which could be on an informal level, lobbying for a party candidate, or group representatives approach party leaders in the parliament to lobby them on an issue. There is a plethora of studies on the extent to which major political parties and major interests have related in the past and continue to relate or interact at the organizational level. Researchers have investigated to what extent parties and groups had formal organizational ties, cooperated in elections, or worked in concert on developing and implementing policies. Factors that for decades have determined the relationship between political parties and interest groups in liberal democracies are political system and subsystem development, political culture and political ideology, centralization of government and policymaking, nature of the party system, political party dependence on interest groups, encompassing characteristics of the interest group system, interest group development, ideology and leadership. However, the pandemic has influenced to a great extend the relationship between interest groups and politics. While Covid-19 crisis has consolidated power within governments, leaving opposition parties in a bind, on the other hand it has galvanized interest groups and businesses to mobilize. The pandemic has opened up the lobbying playing field to many new players. The paper aims to investigate to what extend the pandemic has influenced the relationship between political parties, government and interest groups and what strategies have these last ones used to get heard in a time when social distancing has reduced the opportunities for face-to-face lobbying.

The organisational development of interest groups in Montenegro and Slovenia: Do they contribute to more inclusive democracy?

Abstract Despite the joint history of Montenegro and Slovenia as republics of the former Yugoslavia, the development of the interest groups system has been different in these countries. While in Slovenia, these groups started to develop from the 19th century, in Montenegro the interest groups system was almost non-existent in the pre-socialist period with only a few participative elements, such as the use of tribal assemblies. Socialism did not support associational life, since most of the organizations that were founded at the time were under some form of government control. As a consequence, the interest groups system in Slovenia shrank during socialist rule, while in Montenegro it remained at the same level. During the 1980s and after the collapse of the socialist regime the interest group system in Montenegro finally starts to develop, being heavily influenced by international donor and assistance programmes, while in Slovenia the system had a new opportunity to flourish. In this article we are in particularly interested in how the interest group system contributes to the quality of democracy. Although Montenegrin interest groups have been a tool of influence and democratisation primarily on behalf of the international community, their internal democracy is less sophisticated than is the case in Slovenia. The results show that the origin of the interest groups system and the distinct histories of the specific political cultures seem to be embedded in the functioning of contemporary interest groups. This in turn, determines the strength or weakness of these groups in facing the challenges of de-democratisation.

Polarized Pluralism: Organizational Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System

For decades, critics of pluralism have argued that the American interest group system exhibits a significantly biased distribution of policy preferences. We evaluate this argument by measuring groups’ revealed preferences directly, developing a set of ideal point estimates, IGscores, for over 2,600 interest groups and 950 members of Congress on a common scale. We generate the scores by jointly scaling a large dataset of interest groups’ positions on congressional bills with roll-call votes on those same bills. Analyses of the scores uncover significant heterogeneity in the interest group system, with little conservative skew and notable inter-party differences in preference correspondence between legislators and ideologically similar groups. Conservative bias and homogeneity reappear, however, when weighting IGscores by groups’ PAC contributions and lobbying expenditures. These findings suggest that bias among interest groups depends on the extent to which activities like PAC contributions and lobbying influence policymakers’ perceptions about the preferences of organized interests.

Interest Groups in Multi-Level Contexts: European Integration as Cross-Cutting Issue in Party-Interest Group Contacts

Policy-specific actor-constellations consisting of party- and group-representatives commonly drive the effective establishment of new policy programmes or changes in existing policies. In the EU multi-level system, the creation of such constellations is complicated because it practically requires consensus on two dimensions: the European public policy at stake and the issue of European integration. This means that, for interest groups with interests in particular policy domains, and with limited interest in the actual issue of European integration, non-Eurosceptic parties must be their main ally in their policy battles. We hypothesise that interest groups with relevant European domain-specific interests will ally with non-Eurosceptic parties, whereas interest groups whose interests are hardly affected by the European policy process will have party-political allies across the full range of positions on European integration. We assess this argument on the basis of an elite-survey of interest group leaders and study group-party dyads in several European countries (i.e., Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia) in a large number of policy domains. Our dependent variable is the group-party dyad and the main independent variables are the European policy interests of the group and the level of Euroscepticism of the party. We broadly find support for our hypotheses. The findings of our study speak to the debate concerning the implications of the politicisation of European integration and, more specifically, the way in which party-political polarisation of Europe may divide domestic interest group systems and potentially drive group and party systems apart.

Standing in a Crowded Room: Exploring the Relation between Interest Group System Density and Access to Policymakers

The numerous presence of interest groups may be a recipe for policy deadlock or, more optimistically, indicate the vibrancy of a political community. Population-ecology theory suggests that the number of interest groups active in a policy domain is relevant for strategies and political outcomes, such as policy access, and interest group density is expected to reduce access for individual organizations. Competitive pressures in dense domains necessitate groups to specialize to gain access to the policy access. We empirically assess this argument and indeed find lower levels of access in denser policy fields, moderated by specialization of organizations in lobbying. Furthermore, we identify important differences between mature (the Netherlands and Belgium) and young (Slovenia and Lithuania) interest group systems. These findings address theoretical concerns about the lack of linkages between micro- and macro-studies on interest representation.

Buying media-savviness? Interest groups as clients of public affairs consultants

Public relations agencies are on the rise, and studies have shown that also membership-based interest groups use their services. These agencies employ public affairs consultants who help their clients influence public policy, and their use may have important consequences for interest group systems. As we know little about why interest groups use public affairs consultants and what kind of groups use them the most, we surveyed nationwide interest groups in Finland. We argue that groups use consultants especially when they face challenges with their advocacy strategies. The results show that the more important media strategies are in their advocacy work, the more groups use public affairs consultants. Business groups are more likely to use public affairs consultants than other kinds of groups. When groups’ resources are held constant, more recently established groups use more money on consultants than older groups. We conclude that consultant use may deepen existing biases in interest group politics by strengthening the business groups’ position. The results also imply that media strategies have become especially challenging for groups in the current complex media environment.

Dynamic state interest group systems: a new look with new data

Existing data sets on state interest group systems tend to be either cross-sectional (observations for only 1 year) or panel-style (observations of 2 years about a decade apart). In this paper, I describe a new data set based on raw counts of interest groups and organizations lobbying in the states collected by the National Institute for Money in State Politics, data which are observed annually from 2006 to 2015. After several years of careful coding, I present initial analyses of this state interest group data broken out by economic sector (based on National Center for Economic Statistics codes), support for business policies, differences between membership organizations and other organizational types, like corporations and governments. Furthermore, I also explore how the broad contours of these interest group communities shift and change over time, allowing me to see whether any type of organized interest is able to dominate their state interest group system.

Is politics under increasing corporate sway? A longitudinal study on the drivers of corporate access

This article analyses patterns in interest group access to the political process in the Netherlands from 1970 to 2017. Research has indicated that corporations are amongst the most frequent participants in contemporary political systems. Yet such research has had a strong focus on the US, leaving a gap in our knowledge of corporate lobbying within Europe. This study demonstrates for the first time in a European context that, in contrast to several decades ago, corporations have managed to increase their access to the political process. In doing so, the article tests a new approach that identifies large-scale interest group populations. The method shows itself to be reliable and can therefore be useful for other scholars. The explanatory model indicates that corporate access increases when the economy weakens and political opportunities increase. Overall, the article demonstrates that business interests have managed to expand their access, contributing to a fragmented interest group system.

Kosovo: The development of interest groups in a fragile democracy

Kosovo offers a unique opportunity to study interest groups in both a transitional political system and a new country. As the youngest of the Balkan countries, both its pluralist democracy and its interest group system are in the early stages of development. The most significant influence on this development was Kosovo's grueling fight for independence from Serbia in the 1990s. This produced a particular form of interest and interest group activity quite different from most political systems in transition to democracy. As in all such systems, however, Kosovo's group system has also been shaped by its political culture, socioeconomic, including religious, factors, and particularly the international community. This article explains the various factors that shaped early interest group activity, its characteristics, and how it has evolved into a more traditional group system but one that remains bifurcated.