Public voices in the heavenly chorus? Group type bias and opinion representation

Abstract

While strong voices in the academic literature and real-world politics regard interest groups as biased representatives of the public, we know little about the scope and consequences of such biases for democratic governance. We conduct the first cross-national comparison of group and public preferences analyzing a new dataset of 50 issues in five West European countries. Despite the negative image of interest groups in politics, we find that their positions are in line with public opinion more than half the time. Moreover, while firms and business associations enjoy weaker support for their positions among citizens than public interest groups, they still enjoy the backing of a sizable share of the public. Additionally, we find no general pattern that communities with low interest group diversity are less likely to represent public opinion. Our findings have implications for democratic governance and discussions of how to conceptualize and measure biases in interest representation.

When Diversity Works: The Effects of Coalition Composition on the Success of Lobbying Coalitions

“…Capturing, in addition to these, active cooperation between actors requires collecting even more information, some of which is private, as coalitions do not always leave traces. To enable the present study, an online survey was sent to 1,410 active advocates on 50 policy issues as part of the GovLis Project on government responsiveness 2 (Rasmussen, Mäder, and Reher 2018; see also Flöthe and Rasmussen 2019;Junk and Rasmussen 2019;Rasmussen, Reher, and Toshkov 2019;Romeijn 2018). This survey collected information on issue-specific "signaling coalitions," meaning coalitions that jointly campaigned in public or concertedly approached policy makers.…”

“…The sample of advocates active on these issues was gathered in three separate data-gathering efforts, which should jointly capture lobbying activity in different venues (Flöthe and Rasmussen 2019). First, media coverage on each issue was coded to identify advocates, meaning interest groups, firms, and experts, who made statements on the specific policy issue in the media venue.…”

Public opinion and interest groups’ concerns for organizational survival

“…As Lowery (2007: 83) puts it, 'the determination of goals that come to dominate the selection of lobbying targets and lobbying tactics depends critically on which of the several resources arrays upon which the organization depends faces the most severe challenge'. Recent systematic work on opinion representation shows that citizen groups' concerns for their own survival might at least in part explain why these groups' preferences tend to be more closely aligned to public opinion than those of business groups (Flöthe and Rasmussen, 2019), which suggests that public opinion-related survival concerns might indeed crucially affect what interest groups want and how they behave to achieve those goals.…”

“…Citizen groups, on the other hand, cannot rely on such a stable and defined constituency and therefore need to address a broader audience in their hunt for membership and supporter contributions. Because satisfying both existing and potential members in the general public is more likely to affect their survival (Flöthe and Rasmussen, 2019), increasing the relative use of outside lobbying is likely to be considered a suitable approach for citizen groups seeking to cope with fear of survival. As Dür and Mateo (2016: 6) argue, 'citizen groups invest a larger share of their material resources in activities aimed at ensuring survival, that is, retaining existing or recruiting new members and supporters'.…”

“…This growing body of work, however, has overlooked the questions of whether and how public opinion affects advocacy groups' concerns about their own survival as organizations and what implications these concerns might have for these groups' strategic choices (but see Dür and Mateo, 2016;Flöthe and Rasmussen, 2019 for an exception). While the interest group literature has long assumed that advocacy groups are primarily motivated by a desire to influence public policy (Hansen et al, 2005), a growing number of works stress the importance of reformulating this research agenda by assuming that advocacy groups are fundamentally survival-maximizing organizations (Gray and Lowery, 1997;Lowery, 2007Lowery, , 2013Halpin and Jordan, 2009;Halpin and Thomas, 2012;Dür and Mateo, 2016).…”