Co-operation as currency: how active coalitions affect lobbying success

ABSTRACT

Coalition action is a common lobbying strategy to exert influence over policy, but is rarely addressed in studies of lobbying success. This article adds to resource exchange theory, firstly, that active co-operation with others to gather information, optimize strategies and jointly signal a position should increase lobbying success similarly to spending economic resources on lobbying on an issue individually. Secondly, it expects important interactions between active co-operation and economic resources, because the costs and benefits of co-operation will be distributed unequally among partners who invest different levels of resources themselves. Using new survey data on lobbying on 50 policy issues in five European countries, the article provides strong support for these expectations: Active co-operation on an issue increases lobbying success measured as perceived influence. Moreover, it mediates the effect of individual economic resources on lobbying success. These findings have important methodological and normative implications regarding alternatives pathways of lobbying power.

KEYWORDS:

• Coalitions
• interest groups
• lobbying
• political influence
• public policy
• resources

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the whole GovLis team including Anne Rasmussen, Linda Flöthe and Jeroen Romeijn, as well as all her great colleagues at the University of Copenhagen. She received excellent comments on earlier versions of this article at internal seminars, at the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago and the Low Countries Seminar in Amsterdam. In particular, she would like to thank Joost Berkhout, Marcel Hanegraaf, Iskander de Bruycker, Adriana Bunea, Christine Mahoney, Beth Leech, Peter Thisted Dinesen, Jacob Hariri, Benjamin Carl Krag Egerod, and Livia Rohrbach. Moreover, she is grateful to the four anonymous reviewers and editors at JEPP for their constructive feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Wiebke Marie Junk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6230-6158

Notes on contributor

Wiebke Marie Junk is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen (KU) and a member of the GovLis project on government responsiveness to public opinion and interest groups. Her research interests lie in the fields of public policy, European Union (EU) and global governance, and revolve especially around the involvement of non-state actors. She teaches classes on institutions and policy processes in the EU, lobbying and political advocacy, and research methods.

Notes

1 The term ‘advocate’ denotes non-state actors who try to influence policy discussions and/or outcomes.

2 For more information, see http://govlis.eu.

3 This varied media salience, policy type, and the level of public support.

4 List of newspapers in Appendix E. Codebook available at: http://govlis.eu/codebooks-and-data/.

5 Conducted from December 2016 to May 2017.

6 In the survey, respondents entered the names of co-operation partners in nine text boxes and numbers of partners were counted based on these responses. Manual data cleaning excluded entries on parties or politicians. Where partners were entered in plural, e.g., ‘unions’, this was counted as two partners. The maximum of nine occurred relatively rarely.

7 Appendix G checks robustness for an alternative operationalisation of the Co-operation Index (Table G.1) and the individual items of active co-operation (Table G.2).

8 To compare model fit, this N was held constant. 109 observations in the completed surveys have missing values on the IVs. Appendix B addresses potential bias in perceived influence for these observations (SI: Table B.4). Additionally, 39 observations are missing due to the position-based controls. Table B.5 documents robustness when removing these controls (N = 372).

9 In calculations of marginal effects, other covariates are held at their observed values in the dataset.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Det Frie Forskningsråd: [grant number Sapere Aude Grant 0602-02642B].