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....