Showing papers by "Darren Halpin published in 2018"

Political Parties and Interest Organizations at the Crossroads: Perspectives on the Transformation of Political Organizations:

Abstract: This article reviews the case for considering the study of parties and interest organizations together, under the umbrella of “political organizations.” While both literatures are rather disconnected at the moment, we believe that they share many commonalities. A common narrative involves the apparent transformation of parties and interest organizations, as both organizations are continuously adapting to changing environments. In this review, we integrate both literatures and assess arguments for organizational convergence vis-a-vis claims of continuing diversity. Building upon recent work that takes a more joined-up approach, we advance a common research agenda that demonstrates the value and feasibility of studying these organizations in tandem.

The balancing act of establishing a policy agenda: Conceptualizing and measuring drivers of issue prioritization within interest groups

Abstract: Interest groups are important intermediaries in Western democracies, with the potential to offer political linkage and form a bridge between the concerns of citizens and the agendas of political elites. While we know an increasing amount about the issue-based activity of groups, we only have a limited understanding about how they selected these issues to work on. In this article, we examine the process of agenda setting within groups. In particular, we address challenges of conceptualization and measurement. Through a thorough review of the group literature, we identify five main factors that are hypothesized to drive issue prioritization. We operationalize items to tap these factors and then empirically assess this theoretical model relying on data from a survey of national interest groups in Australia. Our findings, from a confirmatory factor analysis, provide support for the multidimensional nature of agenda setting. We discuss how this provides a firm conceptual and methodological foundation for future work examining how groups establish their policy agenda.

How do interest groups legitimate their policy advocacy? Reconsidering linkage and internal democracy in times of digital disruption

Abstract: The ongoing embrace of interest groups as agents capable of addressing democratic deficits in governing institutions is in large part because they are assumed to contribute democratic legitimacy to policy processes. Nonetheless, they face the challenge of legitimating their policy advocacy in democratic terms, clarifying what makes them legitimate partners in governance. In this article we suggest that digital innovations have disrupted the established mechanisms of legitimation. While the impact of this disruption is most easily demonstrated in the rise of a small number of ‘digital natives’, we argue that the most substantive impact has been on more conventional groups, which typically follow legitimation logics of either representation or solidarity. While several legacy groups are experimenting with new legitimation approaches, the opportunities provided by technology seem to offer more organizational benefits to groups employing the logic of solidarity, and appear less compatible with the more traditional logic of representation.

Online petitioning and politics: the development of Change.org in Australia

Abstract: Online petitions are an important feature of contemporary political engagement in advanced democracies. In this paper we report on a unique data set – covering a five year period and over 17,000 petitions – documenting the development of the Change.org platform in Australia. Australia presents an interesting case as, until very recently, there was no national government hosted online petition site. Our analysis results in three findings that advance scholarship on online petitions. First, we find the majority of petitions are in fact targeted at government, and that their issue area is of a political nature. Second, we find that most signers of petitions sign a single petition – they are not serial participants. Finally, we show that ‘super users’ of the online petition system engage broadly as well as often. Together these findings demonstrate that online petition creation and signing – even on commercial platforms – is a distinct and important part of citizen engagement in politics.

Interest Groups and Policy Capacity: Modes of Engagement, Policy Goods and Networks

Abstract: This chapter focuses on the policy capacity of interest groups. More specifically, it explores which types of policy capacities interest groups may develop. It is widely acknowledged that interest groups can play key roles in the policy process, in particular if they have generated their own capacities through the possession of a number of ‘policy goods’ to assist in policy formulation and implementation. These ‘policy goods’ are highly valued by policymakers. This chapter links different policy goods to analytical, operational and political skills, as well as to different modes of policy engagement. To fully understand the development and value of these capabilities one should look at the links between organizational factors and policy context. That is, the generation of interest group policy capacities is first and foremost a dynamic process, in which policy context and the relationships between government and interest groups shape the generation and value of group capacities.

Assessing the prominence of interest groups in parliament: a supervised machine learning approach

Abstract: Ascertaining which interest groups are considered relevant by policymakers presents an important challenge for political scientists. Existing approaches often focus on the submission of written evidence or the inclusion in expert committees. While these approaches capture the effort of groups, they do not directly indicate whether policy makers consider these groups as highly relevant political actors. In this paper we introduce a novel theoretical approach to address this important question, namely prominence. We argue that, in the legislative arena, prominence can be operationalised as groups being mentioned strategically – used as a resource – by elected officials as they debate policy matters. Furthermore, we apply a machine learning solution to reliably assess which groups are prominent among legislators. We illustrate this novel method relying on a dataset of mentions of over 1300 national interest groups in parliamentary debates in Australia over a six-year period (2010–2016).