Interest groups in multiple streams:specifying their involvement in the framework

Although interests inhabit a central place in the multiple streams framework (MSF), interest groups have played only a minor role in theoretical and empirical studies until now. In Kingdon’s original conception, organized interests are a key variable in the politics stream. Revisiting Kingdon’s concept with a particular focus on interest groups and their activities—in different streams and at various levels—in the policy process, we take this argument further. In particular, we argue that specifying groups’ roles in other streams adds value to the explanatory power of the framework. To do this, we look at how interest groups affect problems, policies, and politics. The influence of interest groups within the streams is explained by linking the MSF with literature on interest intermediation. We show that depending on the number of conditions and their activity level, interest groups can be involved in all three streams. We illustrate this in case studies reviewing labor market policies in Germany and chemicals regulation at the European level

Comparative Interest Group Research

There are challenges to the development of explanatory models of interest group behavior that are valid across a wide range of countries. The position of interest groups in between the policy process and the society and the economy means that a lot of potentially important explanatory factors cannot be theoretically isolated. This creates a fundamental tension between the aspiration to maximize the external, cross-system validity of research findings and the meaningful embedding in country-specific histories, economic structures and societies. This theoretical challenge is conceptually acknowledged in many contemporary studies but still limits the theoretical progress in the field. This contribution discusses the distinct ways in which interest group research has historically dealt with inherent challenges of comparative research designs

Comparative Interest Group Research

There are challenges to the development of explanatory models of interest group behavior that are valid across a wide range of countries. The position of interest groups in between the policy process and the society and the economy means that a lot of potentially important explanatory factors cannot be theoretically isolated. This creates a fundamental tension between the aspiration to maximize the external, cross-system validity of research findings and the meaningful embedding in country-specific histories, economic structures and societies. This theoretical challenge is conceptually acknowledged in many contemporary studies but still limits the theoretical progress in the field. This contribution discusses the distinct ways in which interest group research has historically dealt with inherent challenges of comparative research designs

Group Populations

Scholars from a number of disciplines have shown interest in the enumeration of the interest groups active in particular political systems or the numbers of associations present in a given civil society (e.g., Halpin & Jordan, 2012). Descriptive “maps” of the group population are of critical importance for a range of substantive scholarly interests and is a commodity for several adjacent research methods such as surveys, elite interviewing, and issue sampling. This map will look somewhat different depending on the research interest at stake, and researchers will have to define the limits of their population, critically assess the adequacy of data sources available, and decide upon characteristics and categories of classification