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

Abstract

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.

Developing the improved Community Health Fund in Tanzania: was it a fair process?

“…, 2023 ) and represent standards that can contribute to fairer outcomes ( Gonçalves, 2014 ; Touchton et al. , 2019 ), strengthen legitimacy ( Nakatani, 2023 ; Rasmussen and Reher, 2023 ), build trust ( Hollander-Blumoff and Tyler, 2008 ; Murphy and Tyler, 2008 ; Van Dijke and Verboon, 2010 ) and promote sustainability (Chwalisz, 2020a ; 2020b ) of the policies that are decided upon. Key benefits of using this framework included the ability to identify procedural shortcomings that could potentially explain the final policy design or risks undermining trust and support for the decisions in the future.…”

Distributing Democratic Influence: External Efficacy and the Preferred Influence of Policy Winners and Losers

“…Whelan, 1983;Saunders, 2012;Bengtson, 2021). One plausible explanation for this is that the division between negatively and positively affected groups does not align well with the sorts of differences-such as those driven by vulnerability, historical injustices, or economic resources-that past research suggests people actually care about (e.g., Krimmel & Rader, 2015;Bor et al, 2021;Rasmussen & Reher, 2022).…”

“…This would suggest that any deviation from the normal level of "average" citizen influence will be unpopular. What is more, the division between policy "winners" and "losers" may or may not actually reflect other divisions that citizens care about-such as the divide between disadvantaged and advantaged groups (e.g., Krimmel & Rader, 2015;Rasmussen & Reher, 2022). The same people who might be inclined to think that welfare beneficiaries deserve to have greater input over proposed cuts to their benefits, for example, will arguably be uninclined to extend that reasoning to wealthy individuals set to be hit by a tax increase.…”

Online focus groups as a tool to study policy professionals

“…Political scientists have employed a set of diverse methods to study such political elites and their relationships within and between the organizations they represent or are active in. One can broadly distinguish between the following methods:(1) Those that rely on the coding and analysis of text and other publicly available data (e.g., Coen and Vannoni, 2020; LaPira and Thomas, 2017);(2) Those that rely on information requested from organizations and persons of interest, commonly through surveys of or interviews with organizational representatives (e.g., Beyers et al 2020; Harvey, 2011; Peabody et al, 1990; Heaney 2014; Leech, 2002);(3) Those that entail the observation of behaviors of elites during their professional activities by means of ethnography-type “shadowing” (e.g., Adler-Nissen and Eggeling 2022; Gravante and Poma 2022) or with field experiments (e.g., Grose et al, 2022); and(4) Those that (artificially) manipulate the situations elites must navigate, such as in survey experiments and audit studies (e.g., Aizenberg 2023; Kalla and Broockman 2016; Rasmussen and Reher 2023). …”

“…(4) Those that (artificially) manipulate the situations elites must navigate, such as in survey experiments and audit studies (e.g., Aizenberg 2023; Kalla and Broockman 2016; Rasmussen and Reher 2023).…”