Abstract
Why are some advocacy group populations biased towards business interest representatives? In this paper, we assess an underexplored source of variation in advocacy populations, namely the governance level at which advocacy populations are located. More precisely, we analyse whether national advocacy group populations are more likely to contain relatively large proportions of business interest associations compared to transnational advocacy group populations. We examine three competing hypotheses: (1) biases are stronger at the national level than the global level, (2) biases are more pronounced at the global level than the national level and (3) no differences emerge in business mobilization across the national and transnational levels. We test our hypotheses based on a novel dataset of national, European Union (EU) and global advocacy group populations. Our results indicate that the global level is different from the EU and national levels, in that it contains relatively low proportions of business interest representatives.
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Notes
This refers to the literature regarding ‘INGOs’, which more broadly is deeply embedded in the social movement literature (see Dellmuth and Bloodgood 2019).
This refers to the ‘interest groups literature’, which is rooted in the Comparative Politics literature.
More specifically, the French sampling frame includes the 133 members (Titulaire and Suppleant) of the Le conseil national de la vie associative¸ the 220 professional member federations of the Confédération Général des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises (CGPME) and the 87 member federations of Mouvement des Entreprises de France (MEDEF).
This includes 312 firms (62 from the Netherlands, 53 active in the EU, 95 from France, 84 from the UK, 6 from the German sample and 12 from our international sample). The infrequent presence of individual firms in the international sample compared to the other samples suggests that the empirical support for the ‘world polity’ hypothesis (as reported below) is likely to be even stronger had we found a way to validly measure the policy interests of firm lobbyists.
We exclude from policy areas classification (and analysis) 749 representatives from (semi-) public organizations of which 21 are from Germany and 11 at the EU level. Please note that we include a robustness analysis in Table A3 that addresses these differences.
Specifically, at the level of issues, Baumgartner and Leech (2001) suggest that business interest organizations are more likely than others to maintain presence on even very low density issues, whereas Hanegraaff and Berkhout (2018) indicate a higher relative presence of business interests on ‘crowded’ issues. Density is measured by proportions per policy domain per system.
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Funding was provided by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Grant No. 451-12-017).
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Berkhout, J., Hanegraaff, M. No borders, no bias? Comparing advocacy group populations at the national and transnational levels. Int Groups Adv 8, 270–290 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00060-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00060-1