Interest Groups in the German Bundestag: Exploring the Issue Linkage between Citizens and Interest Groups

Abstract

Do interest groups adjust their activity in response to public opinion? While previous studies have primarily focused on the link between voters, political parties and governments, interest groups have largely been ignored. This article therefore examines how public opinion affects interest group activity. It is argued that interest group activity is a bottom–up process in which interest groups respond to the issue priorities of citizens. Bringing together panel data on citizen concerns with longitudinal data on interest group issue attention, this article examines the issue linkage between citizens and interest groups in Germany from 1984 until 2010 in two different policy domains. Based on a time-series cross-section analysis, it is shown that issue attention of citizens precedes the registration of interest groups in the Bundestag indicating that interest groups play an important role in issue evolution and political representation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this article was generously supported by the British Academy (Grant SG111433) and by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Grant Az. 10.13.2.109). The author would like to thank Joost Berkhout, the anonymous reviewers, and Wade Jacoby for valuable comments and suggestions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heike Klüver is Professor of Empirical Political Science at the University of Bamberg, Germany.

Notes

1 Christine Mahoney, Brussels versus the Beltway: Advocacy in the United States and the European Union (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008); Frank R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C. Kimball and Beth Leech, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Heike Klüver, Lobbying in the European Union: Interest Groups, Lobbying Coalitions and Policy Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

2 Edward. G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, ‘On the Structure and Sequence of Issue Evolution’, American Political Science Review 80/3 (1986), pp.901–20.

3 Greg D. Adams, ‘Abortion: Evidence of an Issue Evolution’, American Journal of Political Science 41/3 (1997), pp.718–37.

4 Jae-Jae Spoon and Heike Klüver, ‘Do Parties Respond? How Electoral Context Influences Party Responsiveness’, Electoral Studies 35 (2014), pp.48–60; Heike Klüver and Jae-Jae Spoon, ‘Who Responds? Voters, Parties and Issue Attention’, British Journal of Political Science (2014), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123414000313.

5 Christopher Wlezien, ‘The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending’, American Journal of Political Science 39/4 (1995), pp.981–1000; James A. Stimson, Michael B. Mackuen and Robert S. Erikson, ‘Dynamic Representation’, American Political Science Review 89/3 (1995), pp.543–65; Sara Hobolt and Robert Klemmensen, ‘Government Responsiveness and Political Competition in Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Political Studies 41/3 (2008), pp.309–37; Will Jennings and Peter John, ‘The Dynamics of Political Attention: Public Opinion and the Queen's Speech in the United Kingdom’, American Journal of Political Science 53/4 (2009), pp.838–54.

6 Stimson et al., ‘Dynamic Representation’.

7 David Lowery and Virginia Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch, or the Natural Regulation of Interest Group Numbers in the American States’, American Journal of Political Science 39/1 (1995): pp.1–19; Virginia Gray and David Lowery, The Population Ecology of Interest Representation: Lobbying Communities in the American States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Anne Messer, Joost Berkhout and David Lowery, ‘The Density of the EU Interest System: A Test of the ESA Model', British Journal of Political Science 41/1 (2011): pp.161–90.

8 David Bicknell Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Knopf, 1951).

9 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

10 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’; Gray and Lowery, The Population Ecology of Interest Representation.

11 See also Virginia Gray, David Lowery, Matthew Fellowes and Jennifer L. Anderson, ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy: Understanding the Demand Side of Lobbying’, American Politics Research 33/3 (2005), pp.404–34; Beth L. Leech, Frank R. Baumgartner, Timothy M. La Pira and Nicholas A. Semanko, ‘Drawing Lobbyists to Washington: Government Activity and the Demand for Advocacy’, Political Research Quarterly 58/1 (2005), pp.19–30.

12 See, for example, Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch'; Gray et al., ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’; David Lowery, Virginia Gray and Matthew Fellowes, ‘Sisyphus Meets the Borg: Economic Scale and Inequalities in Interest Representation’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 17/1 (2005): pp.41–74; Messer et al., ‘The Density of the EU Interest System’.

13 Truman, The Governmental Process.

14 Abram De Swaan, Coalition Theories and Cabinet Formation (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1973).

15 Patrick Fournier, André Blais, Richard Nadeau, Elisabeth Gidengil and Neil Nevitte, ‘Issue Importance and Performance Voting’, Political Behavior 25/1 (2003), pp.51–67; Éric Bélanger and Bonnie M. Meguid, ‘Issue Salience, Issue Ownership, and Issue-based Vote Choice’, Electoral Studies 27/3 (2008), pp.477–91.

16 Mahoney, Brussels versus the Beltway.

17 Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara, Ian Budge and Michael McDonald, Mapping Policy Preferences II: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments in Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD 1990–2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

18 Jan Beyers, Rainer Eising and William Maloney, ‘Researching Interest Group Politics in Europe and Elsewhere: Much We Study, Little We Know?’, West European Politics 31/6 (2008), pp.1106–9.

19 Grant Jordan and William A. Maloney, The Protest Business? Mobilizing Campaign Groups (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); William A. Maloney, ‘Contracting out the Participation Function: Social Capital and Cheque-Book Participation’, in Jan W. van Deth (ed.), Social Capital and European Democracy (London: Routledge, 1999), pp.100–10; Darren R. Halpin, ‘The Participatory and Democratic Potential and Practice of Interest Groups: Between Solidarity and Representation’, Public Administration 84/4 (2006), pp.919–40.

20 Truman, The Governmental Process.

21 Jeffrey M. Berry, The Interest Group Society (New York: Longman, 1997), pp.6–7.

22 An important related question is why issues become salient to citizens in the first place. Numerous studies have tried to explain citizen attention shifts by for instance pointing out the importance of framing (William Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996)), the role of issue entrepreneurship of political parties (Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Sara B. Hobolt and Catherine E. de Vries, ‘Issue Entrepreneurship and Multiparty Competition', Comparative Political Studies (Forthcoming)) or the effect of external events (Thomas A. Birkland, Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after Catastrophic Events (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006)). For the sake of parsimony, this study, however, treats citizen issue attention as an exogenous variable which triggers interest group mobilisation.

23 John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, ‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory?’, American Journal of Sociology 82/6 (1977), pp.1212–41.

24 See, among others, Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch'; Gray et al., ‘Legislative and Interest Advocacy'; David Lowery, Virginia Gray and James Monogan, ‘The Construction of Interest Communities: Distinguishing Bottom–Up and Top–Down Models’, Journal of Politics 70/4 (2008), pp.1160–76; Anne Rasmussen and Brendan J. Carroll, ‘Determinants of Upper-Class Dominance in the Heavenly Chorus: Lessons from European Commission Online Consultations’, British Journal of Political Science 44/2 (2014), pp.445–59. The number of interest groups active in a policy domain is only a proxy for interest group attention to that policy area (see the discussion in Grant Jordan and Darren Halpin, ‘Politics Is Not Basketball: Numbers Are Not Results', in D. Halpin and G. Jordan (eds), The Scale of Interest in Democratic Politics: Data and Research Methods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp.245–62). Even though this measure is far from perfect, it is the only available measure that allows us to trace interest group mobilisation over time which has been accordingly used by numerous empirical studies of interest groups (e.g. Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’; Gray et al., ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy'; Lowery et al., ‘The Construction of Interest Communities'; Rasmussen and Carroll, ‘Determinants of Upper-Class Dominance in the Heavenly Chorus).

25 E.g. Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’.

26 Gert G. Wagner, Joachim R. Frick and Jürgen Schupp, ‘The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP): Scope, Evolution and Enhancements’, Schmollers Jahrbuch 127/1 (2007), pp.139–69.

27 The other two questions by contrast relate to the general economic development and the personal economic situation.

28 Lowery and Gray, ‘The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch’; Gray and Lowery, The Population Ecology of Interest Representation; Gray et al., ‘Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy’; Leech et al., ‘Drawing Lobbyists to Washington’; Messer et al., ‘The Density of the EU Interest System’; Dimiter Toshkov, David Lowery, Brendan Carroll and Joost Berkhout, ‘Timing Is Everything? Organized Interests and Timing of Legislative Activity', Interest Groups & Advocacy 2/1 (2013), pp.48–70.

29 Carmines and Stimson, ‘On the Structure and Sequence of Issue Evolution’; Adams, ‘Abortion’; Hobolt and de Vries, ‘Issue Entrepreneurship and Multiparty Competition’.

30 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

31 These years are based on the observed data and not on the moving average.

32 Truman, The Governmental Process; Gray and Lowery, The Population Ecology of Interest Representation.

33 E.g. Virginia Gray and David Lowery, ‘A Niche Theory of Interest Representation’, Journal of Politics 58/1 (1996), pp.91–111.

34 Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan N. Katz, ‘What to Do (and Not to Do) with Time-Series Cross-Section Data’, American Political Science Review 89/3 (1995), pp.634–47.

35 Ibid.; Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan N. Katz, ‘Nuisance vs. Substance: Specifying and Estimating Time-Series-Cross-Section Models', Political Analysis 6/1, pp.1–36. I have furthermore tested the robustness of the findings using a two-year lag structure. The results correspond to the one-year lag solution and I therefore only present the models including the one-year lag for the issue attention of citizens.

36 Gary King, Michael Tomz and Jason Wittenberg, ‘Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation’, American Journal of Political Science 44/2 (2000), pp.341–55.

37 The increase in the absolute number of interest groups was calculated by multiplying the relative increase (0.03) with the mean number of interest groups (22.05) registered at the Bundestag in the analysed issue areas.

38 Ken Kollman, Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion and Interest Group Strategies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

39 Jan Beyers, ‘Voice and Access: Political Practices of European Interest Associations’, European Union Politics 5/2 (2004), pp.211–40; Anne Binderkrantz, ‘Interest Group Strategies: Navigating between Privileged Access and Strategies of Pressure’, Political Studies 53/4 (2005), pp.694–715.

40 Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

41 David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965).