Blessing or Curse for Congruence? How Interest Mobilization Affects Congruence between Citizens and Elected Representatives

Bruycker, Iskander De; Rasmussen, Anne

doi:10.1111/jcms.13146

Cited by 16 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Input legitimacy concerns ensuring public support for, and participation in, policy-making. It can, for example, be strengthened by interest groups transmitting political information about citizens and stakeholders to policy-makers (De Bruycker & Rasmussen, 2021 ). Output legitimacy, on the other hand, concerns ensuring that policy-makers adopt high quality outputs to solve the challenges at hand.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Political Interest Representation

Eady

Rasmussen

2022

Polit Behav

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The COVID-19 pandemic is viewed by many as the biggest global crisis since WWII and had profound effects on the daily lives of people and decision-making worldwide. Using the pandemic as a system-wide agenda shock, we employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate its causal effects on inequalities in political access, and social media prominence among business interests and NGOs. Our argument is twofold. First, the urgency and uncertainty of crises incentivized decision-makers to privilege providing access to business groups over securing inclusivity in the types of interests consulted. Second, NGOs compensated by increasing prominence in public communications. Our analysis of data from over 10,000 interest groups from over 100 countries registered in the European Union supports these hypotheses. Business interests successfully capitalized on the crisis in insider access, while NGOs increased prominence on social media. The results have wider implications for understanding how large-scale crises affect inequalities in representation.

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Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Political Interest Representation

Eady

Rasmussen

2022

Polit Behav

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“…Finally, interest groups are often argued to act as transmission belts between members of the public and decision makers. This helps decision makers learn about the interest of the public while making it easier for citizens to hold politicians accountable (see, for example, Albareda 2018; Bochel and Berthier 2020; De Bruycker and Rasmussen 2021; Furlong and Kerwin 2005; Rasmussen and Reher 2019; Rasmussen, Carroll and Lowery 2014). Unequal involvement of the key stakeholders could threaten the equity of these transparency and accountability mechanisms.…”

Section: (Unequal) Interest Group Participation and Legitimacy Percep...mentioning

confidence: 99%

(Inequality in) Interest Group Involvement and the Legitimacy of Policy Making

Rasmussen

Reher

2022

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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While interest groups are consulted at different stages of policy making to provide expertise and legitimacy, their influence is often criticized as being undemocratic. Yet, we know little about how their participation in policy making affects citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of governance. Based on survey experiments conducted in the UK, the United States and Germany, our study shows that unequal participation between group types reduces the benefits of interest group consultation for citizens' perceived legitimacy of decision-making processes. Importantly, these legitimacy losses cannot be compensated for by policies that represent the opinion of the under-represented groups and are even greater when policy decisions favour the over-represented groups. Moreover, we show that citizen perceptions of how economically powerful and representative of society different types of interest groups are act as important drivers of legitimacy evaluations. Our results provide important new theoretical and empirical insights into when and why interest groups affect democratic legitimacy.

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“…However, it is also a demanding benchmark given that it always requires the identification of a meaningful connection between the issues publicly voiced in group politics and citizen preferences. Establishing this connection empirically is not an easy task as it requires the operationalisation of the connection between public opinion data and interest group positions (e.g., De Bruycker & Rasmussen, 2021;Flöthe & Rasmussen, 2019). Therefore, often, these connections are based on theoretical assumptions, such as qualifying "business bias" as normatively prob-lematic.…”

Section: What Does a "Democratic" Interest Group System Look Like?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Representative Potential of Interest Groups: Internal Voice in Post-Communist and Western European Countries

Berkhout

Beyers²,

Hanegraaff³

2022

PaG

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Why do some interest group systems provide group members with more elaborate voice opportunities than other systems? We argue that evaluating membership voice is important for understanding the representative potential of interest group systems. An adequate understanding of “voice” forms the basis of “context”-embedded assessments of benchmarks such as interest group bias, interest group representational distortion, and interest group-driven policy overload. We examine two competing hypotheses on the differences in internal voice in Eastern and Western Europe. Primarily, case-specific arguments lead us to expect a weaker internal voice in post-communist Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe. Conversely, some theoretical approaches, such as population ecological organisational theory, lead us to expect a relatively weak membership voice in the organisationally saturated Western European systems. We assess these two hypotheses on the basis of an international survey of interest group leaders and observe, in line with the population ecological hypothesis, that members of Western European interest groups, compared to those in post-communist countries, are perceived as having less influential voices in internal decisions on policy positions. We conclude, neither optimistically nor pessimistically, that there is a meaningful representative potential of interest group systems supporting democratic societies, also, or even especially, in the post-communist countries studied.

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Blessing or Curse for Congruence? How Interest Mobilization Affects Congruence between Citizens and Elected Representatives

Cited by 16 publications

References 59 publications

The Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Political Interest Representation

The Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Political Interest Representation

(Inequality in) Interest Group Involvement and the Legitimacy of Policy Making

The Representative Potential of Interest Groups: Internal Voice in Post-Communist and Western European Countries

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