Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why

Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. By Juan Diez Medrano. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 344p. $39.95. During the 1990s, a number of scholarly books and articles appeared in both Europe and North America to help explain the preferences and motivations of European mass publics concerning the European integration process. These scholarly efforts were spawned in large part by the vast amount of survey data generated by the Commission of the European Union in its efforts to monitor public opinion on issues pertaining to the European Union.

Framing Europe: Attitudes to European Integration in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom

West European Politics in the Age of Globalization. By Hanspeter Kriesi, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornshier, and Timotheos Frey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2008. 468p. $99.00 cloth, $39.99 paper.

The policy making process

We outline a conceptual framework that identifies and characterizes the contextual nature of interest group politics in the European Union (EU) to better understand variation in interest group mobilization, lobbying strategies and interest group influence. We focus on two sets of contextual factors that affect EU interest group lobbying. First, we argue that interest group activities are shaped by several policy-related factors, namely the complexity, the policy type, the status quo, the salience and the degree of conflict characterizing legislative proposals and the associated issues. Second, we posit that lobbying in the EU is affected by institutional factors that vary within the EU political system, such as the institutional fragmentation within the European Commission and the European Parliament and across different national political systems depending on the patterns of interest intermediation or the vertical and horizontal distribution of powers. Finally, we theorize about the interrelation...

/pdf/legislative-lobbying-in-context-towards-a-conceptual-1bx15otejz.pdf

Legislative lobbying in context: towards a conceptual framework of interest group lobbying in the European Union

The interest group concept is defined in many different ways in the existing literature and a range of different classification schemes are employed. This complicates comparisons between different studies and their findings. One of the important tasks faced by interest group scholars engaged in large-N studies is therefore to define the concept of an interest group and to determine which classification scheme to use for different group types. After reviewing the existing literature, this article sets out to compare different approaches to defining and classifying interest groups with a sample of lobbying actors coded according to different coding schemes. We systematically assess the performance of different schemes by comparing how actor types in the different schemes differ with respect to a number of background characteristics. This is done in a two-stage approach where we first cluster actors according to a number of key background characteristics and second assess how the categories of the different interest group typologies relate to these clusters. We demonstrate that background characteristics do align to a certain extent with certain interest group types but also find important differences in the organizational attributes of specific interest group types. As expected, our comparison of coding schemes reveals a closer link between group attributes and group type in narrower classification schemes based on group organizational characteristics than those based on a behavioral definition of lobbying.

http://www.adamwilliamchalmers.com/uploads/2/4/7/0/24705147/iga_baroni_et_al.pdf

Defining and classifying interest groups

NGOs are recognized as active participants in the policy process. There is general agreement that they are agenda setters and important actors in the framing of public issues. They are well-recognized providers of social services on behalf of, or in partnership with, private and public actors. Previous research demonstrates that the institutional context accounts for the extent of NGOs’ access to and influence over public policy making. Nonetheless, we know less about why there are important differences in the way they approach the policy process. Comparing the organizational evolution of two Spanish NGOs, both active in the field of humanitarian aid and poverty alleviation over a period of more than 50 years, this article contributes to our understanding of the relevance of organizational structure in NGOs as a determining factor in their role in public policy. Drawing on institutional organizational analysis, a theoretical framework is developed to assess the importance of organizational structure in explaining why NGOs take on different roles in the policy process, even when sharing the same institutional context. NGOs are driven by pre-existing institutions and legacy that affect the way they resolve conflict and engage in internal bargaining.

The Relevance of Organizational Structure to NGOs’ Approaches to the Policy Process

This article explains why parliamentary groups invite interest groups to the parliamentary arena. It argues that interest groups’ access to committees not only reflects policy-makers’ need for information and expertise but also party preferences and institutional factors such as the type of government, parliamentary committee structure and committee agenda capacity. Results show that interest groups’ access to the parliamentary arena increases under minority governments, in the case of highly conflictual issues, and when the number of permanent committees increases. Also, results demonstrate that parliamentary groups invite interest organisations following different logics – problem-solving or confrontation logic – depending on the type of functions they have to perform – legislative and oversight activities. The article uses a novel, comprehensive database with information on the appearances of all interest groups in the Spanish parliament from 1996 to 2015.

/pdf/explaining-interest-group-access-to-parliamentary-committees-g9evmqqm85.pdf

Explaining interest group access to parliamentary committees

Government–opposition relations in Spain have been long characterised by a high level of consensus and cooperation. The question analysed here is whether the economic crisis initiated in 2008 has created unprecedented levels of conflict in the political system or whether opposition parties have maintained a cooperative strategy oriented to influence far-reaching policy decisions. Results illustrate that patterns of consensus have decreased significantly since the outbreak of the crisis, and this is partly explained by the rising amount of legislation with socio-economic content, variations in the government's popularity, and the type of government. The analysis also shows that the crisis has increased the incentives of opposition parliamentary groups to oppose European Union legislation, especially among left parties.

/pdf/government-opposition-dynamics-in-spain-under-the-pressure-5e03nqlurq.pdf

Luz M. Muñoz Márquez

Papers

Defining and classifying interest groups

The Relevance of Organizational Structure to NGOs’ Approaches to the Policy Process

Explaining interest group access to parliamentary committees

Government–Opposition Dynamics in Spain under the Pressure of Economic Collapse and the Debt Crisis

Los grupos de interés en España: La influencia de los lobbies en la política española