Responding to whom? An experimental study of the dynamics of responsiveness to interest groups and the public

While politicians are commonly depicted as having strong incentives to be responsive to both interest groups and citizens to govern and maintain office, the literature lacks designs that allow for assessing the causal effect of both types of actors on individual policy-makers. This study addresses this gap by formulating theoretical propositions regarding responsiveness of politicians to both public opinion and interest groups and testing them in a vignette experiment with responses from over 2000 Danish and Dutch local, regional and national elected representatives. Our study finds important differences in the dynamics of responsiveness to the two types of actors: Public opinion has a strong direct effect on the intended voting behaviour of politicians, whereas the effects of interest groups are weaker and mainly demonstrate the potential to influence the views of ideologically aligned legislators. Left-wing politicians, in particular, are responsive to civil society groups. These results have implications for understanding political representation and the role of interest groups across multiple levels of government. While the heightened sensitivity of politicians to some aligned groups creates a risk of policy-making biases, it is reassuring that interest groups have a weaker effect than public opinion and primarily hold potential to influence like-minded politicians.</p

Comparing the domestic and the EU lobbying context: perceived agenda-setting influence in the multi-level system of the European Union

<div><p>ABSTRACT</p><p>The contribution analyses whether the factors affecting perceived interest group influence on political agendas differ depending on whether groups lobby in their own domestic context or seek influence at the European Union (EU) level. Findings from a multinomial logistic regression analysis based on survey responses from 1,723 domestic interest groups in the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands do not indicate that differences in the national setting are important for perceived group influence at the two levels. However, they underline how the decision-making level acts as a contextual factor, which conditions the explanatory potential of other crucial variables: Embeddedness into domestic decision-making is primarily an asset for securing perceived influence on the national rather than the EU agenda, whereas group resources matter more at the EU than the national level. In this way our multi-level design underlines how the state-of-play for securing perceived influence varies across lobbying contexts.</p></div

Public voices in the heavenly chorus? Group type bias and opinion representation

<p>While strong voices in the academic literature and real-world politics regard interest groups as biased representatives of the public, we know little about the scope and consequences of such biases for democratic governance. We conduct the first cross-national comparison of group and public preferences analyzing a new dataset of 50 issues in five West European countries. Despite the negative image of interest groups in politics, we find that their positions are in line with public opinion more than half the time. Moreover, while firms and business associations enjoy weaker support for their positions among citizens than public interest groups, they still enjoy the backing of a sizable share of the public. Additionally, we find no general pattern that communities with low interest group diversity are less likely to represent public opinion. Our findings have implications for democratic governance and discussions of how to conceptualize and measure biases in interest representation.</p

Rasmussen_and_Junk_replication_files – Supplemental material for Framing by the Flock: Collective Issue Definition and Advocacy Success

<p>Supplemental material, Rasmussen_and_Junk_replication_files for Framing by the Flock: Collective Issue Definition and Advocacy Success by Wiebke Marie Junk and Anne Rasmussen in Comparative Political Studies</p

Online_Appendices_20042018 – Supplemental material for Framing by the Flock: Collective Issue Definition and Advocacy Success

<p>Supplemental material, Online_Appendices_20042018 for Framing by the Flock: Collective Issue Definition and Advocacy Success by Wiebke Marie Junk and Anne Rasmussen in Comparative Political Studies</p