When do political parties listen to interest groups?

This paper examines when parties listen to interest groups and adopt their input. Interest group information can help parties bolster their positions, and by taking their input into account, parties show that they are responsive to the groups’ interests which can increase their appeal to their constituents. Listening to interest groups can, however, also repel voters who disagree with the groups’ positions. This paper argues that party and issue-level characteristics affect whether the benefits of listening to interest groups exceed the costs. Examining more than 25,000 party-interest group observations on 88 Norwegian policy proposals and using a text reuse approach to measure interest group influence, the findings indicate that public salience, party issue emphasis, interest group coalitions, and government status affect parties’ propensity to listen. This implies that interest groups can be a pertinent source of information for parties under certain circumstances which affects the link between voters and parties.

“Outside Lobbying” over the Airwaves: A Randomized Field Experiment on Televised Issue Ads

We present the first field experiment on how organized interest groups’ television ads affect issue opinions. We randomized 31,404 voters to three weeks of interest group ads about either immigration or transgender nondiscrimination. We then randomly assigned voters to receive ostensibly unrelated surveys either while the ads aired, one day after they stopped, or three days afterwards. Voters recalled the ads, but three ads had a minimal influence on public opinion, whereas a fourth’s effects decayed within one day. However, voters remembered a fact from one ad. Our results suggest issue ads can affect public opinion but that not every ad persuades and that persuasive effects decay. Despite the vast sums spent on television ads, our results are the first field experiment on their persuasive power on issues, shedding light on the mechanisms underpinning—and limits on—both televised persuasion and interest group influence.

Interest Groups and Order in Global Economic Relations

Scholars of international relations have long pointed to organized interest groups as prime movers in the creation of order and disorder in global economic relations. This review introduces interest groups, illustrating the many types—representing producers, workers, consumers, issues, ideologies, and identities—that are examined in current scholarship. The costs, benefits, and challenges of collective organization are highlighted. It also provides a synthetic overview of four stylized varieties of interest group explanations for international order, focusing on: preferences and group size; organization and parties; domestic political institutions; and international institutions and organizations. Each of these factors shaping interest group influence has been treated as fixed in some accounts and as an endogenous outcome of interest group activity in others. Interest group-centered explanations for global order remain a vital and variegated approach within International Political Economy (IPE).

Quantitative analysis on interest group influence using data from EU open consultations

Online submission of interest group comments was introduced in year 2000 and since then has become a regular instrument of stakeholder consultation, providing a new, recent data source, which has largely been ignored so far. The empirical analysis in this research confirms that information supply via online consultations has only a limited effect on interest group influence. The findings of this research are valuable in gaining a more improved view of the effects of interest group activity targeting EU decision-making.

Are All Network Ties Created Equal? Distinguishing Between Strength and Use of Ties in Bureaucrat–Lobbyist Alliances

Scholars of policy networks consistently find that agreement on policy explains network ties, but inconsistent results on the importance of strategic considerations, such as the influence of potential partners. We use original data on communications between bureaucrats and lobbyists on pending Medicaid legislation to distinguish network ties (contacts) from bureaucrats’ use of those ties to attempt to advance their policy goals (requests for lobbying help). We find that policy agreement explains both the strength of network ties and bureaucrats’ requests for advocacy from their partners, but that interest group influence and unified partisan control of government explain only the latter.

Cross-ideological coordination by private interests: Evidence from mortgage market regulation under Dodd-Frank

Rulemaking pursuant to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act provides a useful setting to assess theories of interest group influence. In the wake of the financial crisis, Congress delegated new rulemaking authority to federal agencies to regulate mortgage markets. A critical aspect of this new regulatory regime engendered significant controversy from affected interests: “credit risk retention” would require sponsors of asset-backed securities to retain a stake in the risk of securitized assets. Contrary to unrefined industry capture-based accounts stressing the disproportionate role of larger, well-established regulated entities in setting policy, we find little evidence of sustained effort by large lenders to dilute regulatory standards via political investments. Rather, a diverse coalition of housing sector, community, and civil rights groups, backed by an ideologically diverse swath of legislators, forced substantial regulatory retrenchment. Our analysis suggests a more nuanced view of private influence, in which coordination plays a more substantial role than political investments alone.