The interaction between organised interests and policy makers is an important ingredient of contemporary political systems. In earlier work, interest group scholars have distinguished groups that enjoy access to consultation arrangements from those that are bound to stand on the sideline. Frequently, these insiders are considered to be equally connected to public authorities. Yet their degree of 'insiderness' differs significantly. By unpacking the set of organised interests that have gained access, this article distinguishes core insiders from groups that occupy a more peripheral position in an interest intermediation system. Empirically, we demonstrate and explain varying degrees of insiderness in the community of insider groups in Belgium, using the extensiveness of representation in advisory bodies as a proxy for access. Our findings show that, although nowadays a diverse set of organised interests gets involved in policy-making processes, the inner circle is dominated by traditional economic interests.

While much progress has been made in empirically mapping and analysing a variety of interest group activities in the last decade, less attention has been devoted to conceptual work that clearly defines and distinguishes different forms of policy engagement. This article contributes to this endeavour by developing a theoretical framework that explicitly links currently available measures of the policy engagement of groups to the distinct concepts of group involvement, access and prominence. It argues that greater conceptual clarity will lead to better accumulation of knowledge in the sub‐field and a better understanding of the role of interest groups in political systems.

To understand dynamics within communities of organized interests, researchers have primarily studied organizational births and deaths. The organizational development of established interest organizations has received far less attention. This article claims that the evolution of interest groups' organizational features is strongly affected by evolving resource dependencies with the state. A lifehistory case study of an environmental interest organization is used to substantiate this argument empirically. The findings demonstrate that resource dependence relations with state actors critically shape organizational development, but that this dependence affects an organization's mission, structure, and strategy in different ways. This conclusion highlights the vital role of government patronage in the survival and maintenance of interest organizations.

Interest groups are important intermediaries in Western democracies, with the potential to offer political linkage and form a bridge between the concerns of citizens and the agendas of political elites. While we know an increasing amount about the issue-based activity of groups, we only have a limited understanding about how they selected these issues to work on. In this article, we examine the process of agenda setting within groups. In particular, we address challenges of conceptualization and measurement. Through a thorough review of the group literature, we identify five main factors that are hypothesized to drive issue prioritization. We operationalize items to tap these factors and then empirically assess this theoretical model relying on data from a survey of national interest groups in Australia. Our findings, from a confirmatory factor analysis, provide support for the multidimensional nature of agenda setting. We discuss how this provides a firm conceptual and methodological foundation for future work examining how groups establish their policy agenda. | I N T R O D U C T I O NStudents of political science have invested heavily in enumerating the observable lobbying activity of interest groups. Many studies chart the instances of evidence giving to legislative committees (e.g., Berry, 1999), participation in administrative consultations (e.g., Yackee & Yackee, 2006), and even the lodgement of amicus briefs (e.g., Box-Steffensmeier & Christenson, 2014). Such research has provided compelling evidence that underpins important findings in the field. For instance, such work leads to the consistent finding of mobilization "bias," with the largest volume of lobby activity accounted for by business interests (Baumgartner, Berry, Hojnacki, Kimball, & Leech, 2009;Schlozman, Verba, & Brady, 2012;Walker, 1991). It has also led to findings of skewed mobilization across policy issueswith most issues garnering little lobbying activity, but a small number attracting very high levels and demonstrating patterns of bandwagoning (Baumgartner & Leech, 2001 population-level analysis of the demographics of lobbying (Gray & Lowery, 1996). In short, this work has enabled the discipline to draw important conclusions regarding the nature of interest group activity in contemporary political systems. What this work cannot reveal, however, are the drivers that catalyze groups into the policy action we readily observe. We know that individual agents, political parties, parliaments, and bureaucracies, when faced with numerous calls on their attention, engage in a process of prioritization (Simon, 1957(Simon, , 1985 see Jones, 1999, for a detailed overview). They decide what to act on, and what to leave to one side for the moment. For instance, recent work in this journal demonstrates how elite politicians rely on organizational procedures, heuristics, and self-confidence to deal with information overload (Walgrave & Dejaeghere, 2016). They are extremely selective in identifying the pieces of information that are of relevance to them....

This article reviews the case for considering the study of parties and interest organizations together, under the umbrella of "political organizations." While both literatures are rather disconnected at the moment, we believe that they share many commonalities. A common narrative involves the apparent transformation of parties and interest organizations, as both organizations are continuously adapting to changing environments. In this review, we integrate both literatures and assess arguments for organizational convergence vis-à-vis claims of continuing diversity. Building upon recent work that takes a more joined-up approach, we advance a common research agenda that demonstrates the value and feasibility of studying these organizations in tandem. Scholars of political parties and interest organizations increasingly seem to grapple with very similar questions, such as the evolving position of these organizations between society and state, the difficulties of engaging citizens and the extent to which external factors, such as state regulation and mediatization, shape organizational structures and practices. So far, unfortunately, a lack of engagement across the party and interest organization literatures has resulted in highly informative yet parallel conversations on what might productively be conceptualized as the same basic trends or processes. We believe our understanding of the organizational form and development of interest organizations and political parties would be advanced substantially by addressing them under the broader

In most political systems, the community of policy insiders represents a small subset of the total interest group population. Therefore, one key question is which factors explain why some mobilized interests become insiders and others remain outsiders. By contrasting a bottom-up registration of interest groups with a top-down census of all groups that enjoy access to policymakers, we present a unique approach to distinguish insiders from outsiders. This approach allows us to systematically analyze which factorssuch as resources, constituency, scale of organization and policy portfolio -predict who becomes a policy insider. Our analysis focuses on interest group politics in Belgium, and shows that next to resources, the size of the membership, the scale of organization and a group's policy portfolio are strong predictors of the likelihood to gain access.

Communities of civil society organizations are characterized by substantial volatility, as new organizations are continuously established and old ones are regularly disbanded. This article aims to improve our understanding of the dynamic nature of civil society by focusing on a particular aspect of organizational maintenance, namely, mortality anxiety. Building upon previous work that assesses actual and perceived survival chances of civil society organizations, we examine how inter-organizational competition, ties with public authorities, and the internal institutionalization of civil society organizations shape how these groups assess their survival chances. Our results demonstrate that high levels of inter-organizational competition and a strong reliance on government funding significantly increase mortality anxiety. Furthermore, they highlight the importance of a professionalized and internally differentiated structure. We rely on survey data and focus on the case of Belgium, in this way providing a first assessment of mortality anxiety in a neo-corporatist political system.

Any democratic society requires mechanisms for citizens to have effective political voice. Clearly, political parties provide a key channel for expressing views and preferences. However, organised interests provide another important mechanism for such representation. A crucial question in this regard is whether the interest group system is capable of ensuring the representation of a variety of public and private interests. Resolving these debates requires data that map the terrain and also are attentive to organisational diversity. This article takes up this challenge through exploring the composition and diversity of the Australian system of organised interests, using a new data set based on the Directory of Australian Associations. This system-level approach delivers important insights into the nature of the Australian interest group system, as well as provides a framework for subsequent work interpreting and contextualising advocacy activities of particular groups, or lobbying dynamics in specific policy domains.