Politicized policy access: The effect of politicization on interest group access to advisory councils

Willems, Evelien

doi:10.1111/padm.12651

Cited by 23 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 60 publications

(177 reference statements)

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“…From an interest groups perspective, these results suggest that the inefficiency costs related to member involvement come at a price of lower reactivity at the EU level (Hollman, 2018) and negatively affects access to administrative venues (Willems, 2020). In other words, for groups that enjoy high levels of access, maintaining member involvement might be very challenging, as it is rather costly and time-consuming, and might reduce their decision-making speed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prioritizing professionals? How the democratic and professionalized nature of interest groups shapes their degree of access to EU officials

Albareda

2020

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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Interest groups are key intermediary actors between civil society and public officials. The EU has long emphasized the importance of interacting with representative groups that involve their members. Additionally, there is an increasing trend toward the professionalization of groups that invest in organizational capacities to efficiently provide policy expertise. Both member involvement and organizational capacity are crucial features for groups to function as transmission belts that aggregate and transfer the preferences of their members to policymakers, thus reinforcing the legitimacy and efficiency of governance systems. Yet, not all groups have these organizational attributes. This paper quantitatively examines the effects of interest groups’ investment in member involvement and organizational capacity on the level of access to EU Commission officials. The results indicate that member involvement does not pay off in terms of higher levels of access. In contrast, groups with high organizational capacities have more meetings with public officials of the Commission.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prioritizing professionals? How the democratic and professionalized nature of interest groups shapes their degree of access to EU officials

Albareda

2020

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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“…These values were then summed for each organization and divided by 52 (weeks in a year). Finally, we assessed whether 1,687 organizations had access to one of 616 Belgian advisory councils to differentiate insiders from outsiders (for details, see Willems, 2020). We identified 608 organizations enjoying access to advisory councils (36 per cent).…”

Section: Data and Research Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public support and advocacy success across the legislative process

Willems

Beyers

2022

European J Political Res

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This paper examines how public support affects interest groups' advocacy success across three distinct stages in the legislative process. We hypothesize that public support is vital for advocacy success when coalition agreements are negotiated, and it has a weaker effect when legislation is introduced in parliament by the governing majority but becomes stronger again when legislation is adopted. We assess these expectations for 55 Belgian policy issues. We combine evidence on legislative outcomes with public opinion data and a mapping of interest groups' positions in the news. The results indicate that public support is key for advocacy success in the coalition agreement. However, the positive effect of public support weakens when legislation is introduced in parliament -the effect only materializes for initiatives by the opposition -and public support has no significant effect on advocacy success in adopted legislation. Instead, aligning with other groups and political parties becomes more consequential for advocacy success in later legislative stages. Still, on average, interest groups attaining their preferences in adopted legislation enjoy considerable public support. Our results thus underscore the relevance of distinguishing between legislative stages when analyzing interest groups' advocacy success.

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“…Therefore, much recent state-of-the-art interest group research has relied on large-scale (online) surveys (e.g., Beyers et al 2020 ; Willems 2020 ). These bear the advantage of relatively low costs despite great human efforts involved in designing surveys, identifying target populations, generating responses and maintaining and data processing.…”

Section: A New Comparative Interest Group Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

Organized interests in post-communist policy-making: a new dataset for comparative research

et al. 2022

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This article familiarizes readers with the international research project ‘The Missing Link: Exploring Organized Interests in Post-Communist Policy-Making’ (OrgIntCEE). The project team has focused on how populations of organized interests in the region have evolved, how they interact with state institutions as well as the group-specific characteristics driving access to policy-makers. The project also explores how Europeanization has affected post-communist interest groups as well as other factors contributing to their “coming-of-age.” We provide a comprehensive overview of the population ecology and survey datasets, while shedding light on the challenges during the data collection process. After a short overview of the project context and structure, we present some country-specific aggregated data on organizational densities and their political activity. We also reflect on potential uses for the data, before wrapping up the article with a self-critical assessment of what could have been done differently as a roadmap for future research.

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Politicized policy access: The effect of politicization on interest group access to advisory councils

Cited by 23 publications

References 60 publications

Prioritizing professionals? How the democratic and professionalized nature of interest groups shapes their degree of access to EU officials

Prioritizing professionals? How the democratic and professionalized nature of interest groups shapes their degree of access to EU officials

Public support and advocacy success across the legislative process

Organized interests in post-communist policy-making: a new dataset for comparative research

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