Policy today or office tomorrow?

Abstract

Interest groups play an important role in contemporary democracies. They aggregate interests, spread information and attempt to influence policies. But how can we explain that some groups have an easier time than others finding a willing ear amongst legislative party groups? Parties have up until recently been overlooked in the literature about bias in interest group influence, despite them being important actors in contemporary democracies. This thesis examines one piece of the larger puzzle; bias in interest group influence on the party’s legislative branches. Hypotheses are deducted from a rational choice framework that sees bias in interest group influence on legislative party groups as a resource exchange where parties give interest groups policy influence today in exchange for interest group resources that can help the party obtain office and policy in the future. Explanatory factors related to issue, party and interest group characteristics are explored. Both media issue salience, party issue salience, interest group resources and party size are found to have an effect on bias in interest group influence. While there are several variables with a significant effect, I do not find support for any of my hypotheses. Nevertheless, there seems to be an interesting covariation between several of the variables I include in the analysis and bias in interest group influence. These are relationships that deserve more attention in the future