Interest groups differ in the strategies they use to influence public policy. Some mainly try to gain access (i.e., have direct contact with decision makers), whereas others tend to ‘go public’ by ...launching campaigns that aim to mobilise the broader public. In this article it is argued that group type – namely the distinction between business associations, professional associations and citizen groups – is a major determinant of the choice of strategy. The effect of group type, however, is conditional on the group's endowment with material resources and the issue context: the differences across group types are largest for resource‐rich associations and associations active in distributive policy fields. Original data from surveys of national associations in five European countries (Austria, Germany, Ireland, Latvia and Spain) enable the assessment of this argument. The theoretical expectations are supported, with the results having relevance for the normative evaluation of political systems and the positive study of interest group influence.
Different types of interest groups use different lobbying strategies. This article presents an investigation of this already well‐established hypothesis once more, but additionally proposes that the ...institutional framework of the country in which interest groups operate also influences their lobbying behaviour. More specifically, it is shown that groups working in the interest of the public are better integrated into the policy‐making process when direct democratic instruments, such as referendums, occur regularly (as in Switzerland) than when referendums are the exception (Germany). The article demonstrates that Swiss cause groups – often also referred to as ‘public interest groups’ in the literature – use a more balanced mixture of insider and outsider strategies than their German peers, but also that this moderating effect cannot be found for specific interest groups, such as industry groups or unions.
Although interest group strategies have been studied by a number of authors who compare different types of groups, our knowledge about how these different types of groups differ in the way they use ...social media as a strategy to realise their goals is limited. In this paper, we use the hierarchy of engagement model and investigate how British public interest groups and sectional groups, which are active at the European Union (EU) level, engage with the public on Facebook. Compared with information and community-type posts, action-type posts can attract more attention on social media. Public interest groups can use action-type messages as a tool for attracting public attention, thus, alleviating their relative disadvantage in attracting and maintaining members. Results show that the use of action-type messages are significantly higher for public interest groups.
In this article, we offer insights into the plurality of interest groups’ strategic responses to the socially, politically, and economically transformative phenomenon of democratic backsliding. For ...the purpose of the article, the term “ideational plurality” has been coined to refer to a plurality of interest groups’ ideas leading their activities in general and their choice of strategies concerning the government in particular (attitudinal and behavioural aspects). Two policy fields and two types of interest groups engaged in an institutionalised social partnership—advocacy NGOs (operating in the environmental policy field) and economic groups (trade unions)—are studied comparatively in Slovenia using a mixed‐methods approach. The key findings are that strategic responses to democratic backsliding vary between environmental NGOs and trade unions, as do their ideational plurality, and that environmental NGOs’ ideational plurality damages their potential to struggle against democratic backsliding. In contrast, trade unions’ ideational homogeneity enables them to jointly struggle against governmental destruction of one significant segment of democratic order (institutions of social partnership) without demanding that the government step down for misusing the Covid‐19 pandemic to establish a system of governance that resonates with Viktor Orbán’s ideas of illiberal democracy.
This article is interested with the legal mobilization of transnational interest groups at the European level (European Union and Council of Europe). It compares the legal and political lobbying ...strategies of two umbrella organizations - the European Women's Lobby (EWL) and the European Roma and Travellers Forum (ERTF), which seek respectively to promote the rights of women and those of Roma - focusing on their interactions with European institutions and law. The article analyses the contrasted relationship of these groups to legal mobilization as a rights advancement strategy, shedding new light on how law can be strategically used by both strong and weak civil society actors. Beyond classical factors linked to organizational characteristics and identity, the differential usages of law by the two groups are explained by the role of strategic actors who adapt to the specificities of the system of governance in the two policy sectors - gender equality and anti-discrimination.
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