Campaigns without civil society? The involvement of organized interests in electoral politics

ABSTRACT

Elections are key moments for interactions between civil society and representatives. While bottom-up mobilization tries to influence the composition of parliament and policy outputs, political parties and politicians engage with broader civil society to strengthen their legitimacy and to obtain strategic benefits in terms of electoral results. This study focuses on the role organized interests play in election campaigns and explains why collective societal actors do not engage in a significant way in the electoral process. By examining the Portuguese case during the 2019 elections, this study relies on data triangulation to map the involvement of organized interests in the electoral process. We argue that political parties have no incentives to foster linkages with interest groups, while civil society organizations prefer to stay in the shade or do not have opportunities to engage in electoral politics. The findings have implications not only in terms of low levels of political mobilization, but also with regard to policy innovation (and lack thereof).

KEYWORDS:

• Organized interests
• political parties
• elections
• political representation
• Portugal

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The terms ‘interest groups', ‘organized interests', ‘organized groups' or ‘organized civil society’ are used interchangeably in this text.

2 Given that our primary focus is on the associational component of organized civil society, we exclude from this study individual companies, think tanks or law firms.

3 The distinction between insider and outsider groups aims to distinguish between those organizations with direct contacts to decision-makers and those groups that have no access to public officials.

4 See Table A1 in the online appendix for the list of abbreviations.

5 The new regulations did not avoid some cases of illegal funding from private donors, mostly related to individuals or companies (see Sousa, 2014).

6 There are some works dealing with the broader concept of civil society, but the universe of organization is wider than the types of actors surveyed in this study, as they include many civic associations that do not have any relevant activity or role in the policy-making process.

7 The survey was active from January to August 2019 and was administered through Internet via one-click survey (https://www.1ka.si/d/en). Dataset and additional information are available upon request from the corresponding author.

8 The interviews took place between September 2018 and June 2019, the period just before the beginning of the 2019 election campaign.

9 See the online appendix (Table A3) for question wording.

10 For example, in the 2019 elections nursing trade unions and several associations linked to urban mobility sent their proposals by email to all parties. These efforts usually have no direct impact on policy positions, but they can gain media visibility.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT): [Grant Number UIDB/04627/2020].