Although authoritarian countries often repress independent citizen activity, lobbying by civil society organizations is actually a widespread phenomenon. Using case studies such as China, Russia, ...Belarus, Cambodia, Malaysia, Montenegro, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, Lobbying the Autocrat shows that citizen advocacy organizations carve out niches in the authoritarian policy process, even influencing policy outcomes. The cases cover a range of autocratic regime types (one-party, multi-party, personalist) on different continents, and encompass different systems of government to explore citizen advocacy ranging from issues such as social welfare, women’s rights, election reform, environmental protection, and land rights. They show how civil society has developed adaptive capacities to the changing levels of political repression and built resilience through ‘tactful contention’ strategies. Thus, within the bounds set by the authoritarian regimes, adaptive lobbying may still bring about localized responsiveness and representation. However, the challenging conditions of authoritarian advocacy systems identified throughout this volume present challenges for both advocates and autocrats alike. The former are pushed by an environment of constant threat and uncertainty into a precarious dance with the dictator: just the right amount of acquiescence and assertiveness, private persuasion and public pressure, and the flexibility to change quickly to suit different situations. An adaptive lobbyist survives and may even thrive in such conditions, while others often face dire consequences. For the autocrat on the other hand, the more they stifle the associational sphere in an effort to prevent mass mobilization, the less they will reap the informational benefits associated with it. This volume synthesizes the findings of the comparative cases to build a framework for understanding how civil society effectively lobbies inside authoritarian countries.
This book examines organized interests in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), providing incisive analyses in three critically important policy areas - healthcare, higher education and ...energy. The four countries surveyed – Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic – afford rich diversity offering broad empirical material available for cross-country and cross-policy comparative analyses. Featuring interdisciplinary research, the book draws together recent developments in the evolution of post-communist advocacy organizations, their population ecology dynamics, interest intermediation, the influence of organized interests and their (bottom-up and top-down) Europeanization. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Central and Eastern European politics, interest groups and lobbying, post-communism, transition and consolidation studies, and more broadly to European studies/politics.
The Democratic Deficit in the States Lax, Jeffrey R.; Phillips, Justin H.
American journal of political science,
January 2012, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state-level support for 39 policies across eight ...issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy-specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking "democratic deficit": policy is congruent with majority will only half the time. The analysis considers the influence of institutions, salience, partisan control of government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of this democratic deficit. We find the largest influences to be legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate degree thereof. Finally, policy is overresponsive to ideology and party—leading policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.
Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy--but as this book ...demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged.Affluence and Influencedefinitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections.
With sharp analysis and an impressive range of data, Martin Gilens looks at thousands of proposed policy changes, and the degree of support for each among poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. His findings are staggering: when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. In contrast, affluent Americans' preferences exhibit a substantial relationship with policy outcomes whether their preferences are shared by lower-income groups or not. Gilens shows that representational inequality is spread widely across different policy domains and time periods. Yet Gilens also shows that under specific circumstances the preferences of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, the poor, do seem to matter. In particular, impending elections--especially presidential elections--and an even partisan division in Congress mitigate representational inequality and boost responsiveness to the preferences of the broader public.
At a time when economic and political inequality in the United States only continues to rise,Affluence and Influenceraises important questions about whether American democracy is truly responding to the needs of all its citizens.
Do lobbyists provide issue-specific information to members of Congress? Ordo they provide special interests access to politicians? We present evidence to assess the role of issue expertise versus ...connections in the US Federal lobbying process and illustrate how both are at work. In support of the connections view, we show that lobbyists follow politicians they were initially connected to when those politicians switch to new committee assignments. In support of the expertise view, we show that there is a group of experts that even politicians of opposite political affiliation listen to. However, we find a more consistent monetary premium for connections than expertise.
With the increasing prominence of special interest group activity in the organizational external environment, we build on the stakeholder literature on strategic management to explain how ...organizations respond to pressures from such groups. Using a model integrating institutional, resource dependence, resource-based, and cognitive theoretical perspectives, we examine the restaurant industry's response to the fat reduction pressure campaign run by a nutritional interest group, the National Heart Saver's Association (NHSA) in the early 1990s. Our findings indicate that susceptibility to institutional pressures partially affected accommodation to NHSA's demands, and more strongly affected organizational cognitions of those pressures. Our measure of resource dependence did not directly affect accommodation, but was significantly related to managerial cognitions. Resource-based factors had a strong direct effect on the extent of accommodation to the pressures of NHSA, and partially influenced measures of cognition. Further, our findings indicate that managerial cognition strongly influenced on organization's response to NHSA pressure. From these results we suggest strategies for managers as they try to make sense of and respond to interest group pressures. We also point to future avenues of inquiries for researchers.
While anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy, there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue. In this paper, we construct an ...industry-level dataset for the United States, by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration. We find robust evidence that both pro- and anti-immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration policy across sectors. Barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobbying expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important.
► We construct a dataset on lobbying expenditures to influence migration policy. ► We find that lobbying affects the allocation of work visas across sectors. ► More visas are allocated to sectors in which business interest groups lobby more. ► Less visas are allocated to sectors where labor unions are more important.
We propose a theory of political parties in which interest groups and activists are the key actors, and coalitions of groups develop common agendas and screen candidates for party nominations based ...on loyalty to their agendas. This theoretical stance contrasts with currently dominant theories, which view parties as controlled by election-minded politicians. The difference is normatively important because parties dominated by interest groups and activists are less responsive to voter preferences, even to the point of taking advantage of lapses in voter attention to politics. Our view is consistent with evidence from the formation of national parties in the 1790s, party position change on civil rights and abortion, patterns of polarization in Congress, policy design and nominations for state legislatures, Congress, and the presidency.
El objetivo de esta sección monográfica de la Revista Española de Ciencia Política (RECP) es analizar la movilización de los grupos de interés durante la pandemia generada por el virus SARS-CoV-2 ...(COVID-19). En un contexto de gran incertidumbre, los grupos de interés refuerzan su papel como actores clave en el proceso de elaboración de las políticas públicas. Por un lado, estos grupos pueden contribuir a simplificar el debate político canalizando frente a los poderes públicos las diferentes formas de entender los problemas derivados de la pandemia. Por otro, sindicatos, patronales, colegios profesionales y organizaciones no gubernamentales pueden contribuir a garantizar la eficiencia de las respuestas políticas a la crisis a través de la elaboración de indicadores, informes y estudios en profundidad sobre problemas concretos. Esta información es especialmente relevante en un contexto de crisis, en el que ningún actor del sistema político por sí solo dispone de los instrumentos para prever y definir respuestas eficaces a los riesgos derivados de la propagación de un virus a nivel global. Del mismo modo, los grupos pueden contribuir a legitimar las decisiones políticas y a reducir los conflictos potenciales derivados de la implementación de estas decisiones entre los diferentes colectivos que representan.
Citizens delegate the representation of their political preferences to members of Parliament (MPs), who are supposed to represent their interests in the legislature. However, MPs are exposed to a ...variety of interest groups seeking to influence their voting behavior. We argue that interest groups influence how MPs cast their vote in Parliament, but that this effect varies across groups. While lobbying by sectional groups provides incentives for MPs to defect from their constituents, we expect that cause groups in fact strengthen the link between MPs and their voters. We test our argument based on an innovative study of 118 Swiss public referenda, which allows for directly comparing voter preferences with legislative voting of 448 MPs on these issues. Drawing on a multilevel regression analysis, this study shows that interest groups considerably affect the link between MPs and their voters. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation.
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