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ABSTRACT
In democratic politics, the participation of interest groups in policymaking is commonly understood as a secluded affair. Why would interest groups and policymakers make public an otherwise private affair? I argue that legislators invite interest groups to participate in the legislative process to raise the salience of issues they ”own”. Legislators with gatekeeping authority, I show, bring interest groups into committees when their party benefits from raising public attention. Interest groups, on their part, are given preferential access to finetune laws that directly affect them. Extensions of the model show that participation increases before an election and declines after, with issue salience providing electoral benefits rather than policy ones. I test my argument using an original dataset of 4902 instances of interest group participation in committee meetings in the Ecuadorian Congress between 1988 and 2018, as well as over 30 interviews to interest group representatives, legislators, and congressional staff.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In “outside lobbying” (Kollman, Citation1998) – or the attempts to send signals to policymaker by communicating public support – the policymaker has little control over the strategic considerations of interest groups.
2 It is worth noting that in some legislatures there is either no space for the participation of interest groups during the policy-creation process (e.g. Bolivia) or that the participation of interest groups is not conditioned by the gatekeeping prerogatives of a legislator (e.g. Colombia).
3 The legislative coalition in the Ecuadorian Congress has often been clandestine, what Acosta (Citation2009) defines as “ghost coalitions”.
4 Even though there are strong electoral (Iyengar, Citation1993; Sides, Citation2006) and policy (Cox & McCubbins, Citation2005) incentives for politicians to focus on issue the party owns, there are instances when the parties might choose to focus on an issue they do not own. For example, when the salience of an unowned issue rises, parties cannot avoid engaging with the issue (Petrocik, Citation1996; Sides, Citation2006). Furthermore, parties can also improve their reputation in contested issues or can expand their issue repertoire by promoting unowned issues (Bos et al., Citation2017)
5 Since interest groups can benefit from committee participation, it is possible for them to directly lobby party leaders, the executive, or legislative authorities to get invitations to participate. Indeed, this is often the case. In an interview, the president of the Chamber of Commerce of Quito (Ecuador) highlighted the importance of meeting with the executive to gain access to the legislative process. However, he, as well as other interviewees (e.g. president of the Association of Textile Industries of Ecuador, representative of the Association of Private Bank of Ecuador) suggested that the bottleneck at the executive was much narrower. The decentralised nature of the Ecuadorian Congress allowed them to pursue multiple strategies, approaching different political actors that were relevant in the process. The alternative routes of gain access are not in contradiction with one another. Rather, they are carried out simultaneously. Since the invitation of interest groups is determined by a party strategy (i.e. raising the salience of owned issues) we would expect party leaders, the executive, and legislative authorities to grant access based, partially, on that strategy.
6 Not all institutional arrangements grant committee chairs the same prerogatives described here. Sieberer and Höhmann (Citation2017), for example, show the variation of committee chair power across European countries, and its relation to the number of “shadow” ministers used to monitor coalition partners. I discuss the implications of possible differences in committee strength and their effect on the strategy used by parties to strategically invite interest groups in the discussion section.
7 This body of research focuses more on the characteristics of interest groups that gain access to committees, than on the strategic decisions made by gatekeepers to invite them.
8 A more detailed account of the prerogatives of committee chairs in the Ecuadorian Congress is presented in Section 3.
9 Do you need to agree with the groups that you invite? Issue ownership and salience, rather than ideological congruence, is what matters. Consider, for example, a Democrat in the U.S. Senate that invites the CEO of Facebook to discuss possible foreign interference in the 2016 election. (See “Mark Zuckerberg Testimony: Senators Question Facebook's Commitment to Privacy”, New York Times, April 10, 2018. Access: June 26, 2019. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/us/politics/mark-zuckerberg-testimony.html). Democratic senators did not invite Mark Zuckerberg because they agreed with him, but rather to raise the salience of an issue by publicly scolding him. Inviting someone to have a public interaction sometimes means confronting them. In other words, legislators can still raise the salience of an issue by inviting groups that they do not agree with. Even though this might not be often the case, the theory advanced in this paper does not hinge on the ideological congruence between the policymakers and interest groups. Rather, it stresses the importance of raising issues salience and is agnostic about the means to achieve this.
10 Interview with Christian Walhi, Executive President of ANFAB. October 15, 2018. Similar, researchers have argued that raising the salience of an issue forces politicians to participate and act on those issues (Niemi & Bartels, Citation1985; Petrocik, Citation1996; Sides, Citation2006).
11 This strategy is not at odds with the idea of interest groups focusing on the “fine print” of the law. Even when bills have a broad impact on an issue, the discussion usually focuses on one or two articles.
12 Legislators, however, get to decide which interest group gets to publicise their “access”.
13 As previously mentioned, at the committee level bills are discussed article by article which can provide interest groups facing opposition a window to change some specific article in their benefit even when the bill as a whole will not favour them. This is one extension of the idea of micromanaging policy.
14 The gatekeeping authority extends to the first hurdle in the flow of legislation: the CAL (Comisión Administrativa Legislativa). The CAL is not only in charge of assigning bills to specific committees but also in charge of letting these reach committee in the first place. Often a technical committee (e.g. Argentina), in Ecuador the president of Congress also chairs the CAL.
15 Interview with Gabriela Larreátegui, Congresswoman of the Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador. October 19, 2018; interview with Congressional Staff Member 2. October 20, 2018.
16 Procedural rules require that all bills approved by the CAL are reviewed in committees and sent to the plenary floor. We should see the same number of bills approved by the CAL as bills exiting from committees to the floor.
17 Interview with Congressional Staff Member 1 of the Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador. March 25, 2019; interview with Gabriela Larreátegui, Congresswoman of the Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador. October 19, 2018; interview with Congressional Staff Member 2. October 20, 2018.
18 Interview with Congressional Staff Member 1 of the Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador. March 25, 2019.
19 The chair of the CAL is not negotiated, but is also one of the roles of the president of the legislature. The president of the legislature, by law, is a member of the majority/plurality party.
20 For example, selectively inviting groups to provide information on a policy position to bolster the likelihood of a bill being supported by other legislators.
21 There is some evidence suggesting that, despite the incentives for individualist behaviour, there is party coordination in Ecuador. First, as previously explained, there is party coordination when it comes to assigning important members to gatekeeping positions in the legislature. Second, committee chairs, as part of a broader coordination strategy, invite more interest groups to participate in those bills that are favored by their own coalition (see Appendix 4).
22 See Appendix 1 for a detailed explanation on how interest groups were identified and their distribution across industries.
23 Note that using survey data to explain issue ownership is problematic on its own: voters often conflate issue ownership with voting preference and ideological position, especially in multiparty systems (for a review, see Walgrave et al., Citation2015).
24 Budge and Farlie (Citation1983), Guinaudeau and Persico (Citation2014), and Walgrave and De Swert (Citation2004).
25 I estimate the topics using Structural Topic modelling (STM). For a detailed recount on the process and the decision to use STM over other alternatives, see Appendix 2.
26 As a robustness check, I see the effect on interest group participation from one to six months before an election.
27 Full summary statistics are presented in Appendix 3.
28 For example, members of Parliament might be granting interest groups access to policy, but doing so strategically, as to increase the salience of issues the party owns.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sebastián Vallejo Vera
Sebastián Vallejo Vera is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, USA. His research focuses on legislative politics, gender, and racial identity in Latin America.