" Get there fastest with the mostest " kalauerte, once the Confederate Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest (who was named after the movie hero Forrest Gump ). The winning formula the cavalry is wrong for the lobbyists not on the battlefield Brussels.
who filled early with a large number of combatants is a political issue, has secured a disproportionate influence. The influence of interest groups on policy depends on the relative strength of the stakeholders and environment issues from . Depending on the stakeholder and thematic context, a lobby has better or worse chances.
With the empirical evidence and differentiation, the science does, however, difficult. On individual case analysis, it is usually also do not influence and is indeed not easy to measure.
tried a new study it with a big throw: Heike Klüver , postdoc at the University of Oxford, in 2696 brings input from interest groups and 56 individual topics in an investigation. She is interested in the policy formulation stage at the European Commission, leading to a draft law. With quantitative text analysis, they attempted to diffuse Phenomenon of "influence" issues and in evaluating who was instrumental in lobbying won or lost at this stage - and why.
The results of the study are enlightening as confirmation and differentiation of practice experience:
- Lobbying is not a game for "lonely rider", but a collective effort - regardless of whether interest groups unite formal alliances, informally coordinate or speak not at each other. As for their influence opportunities, they sit on the high seas of politics in the same boat - and the opposite side in another.
- Central is the relative strength: Like many other stakeholders on your side and how many are on the opposite side. Whatever the political issue, the impact on the draft law of the European Commission continues to grow with the relative strength of the alliance comrades.
- But Who now believes that we must drum them hard and increase the awareness of a topic to attract more allies to his side, can be mistaken huge.
- For, according to the statistics, the drums for more attention to a topic is usually good only for the already larger and more dominant side.
- The empirical analysis shows that the reduce interest on the weaker side with such a strategy in fact their chances of political influence. go so better off, the topic does not draw more in the public and to the top of the political agenda. "This has important implications for the lobbying strategies of interest groups," said Kluever.
- how complex an issue is and how much is debated about is in contrast to the influence of an interest group in this stage of the legislative process rather irrelevant.
context of topics: Important factor for lobbyists
The starting point: A political conflict theme (issue) has certain characteristics:
- attention and prominence of a topic - scientifically known as salience, this is about the question of whether a subject more sector-specific and "technical" nature and will be considered, therefore, only a few experts, or whether many stakeholders and interested even across sectors, the general public for it;
- intensity of the conflict - thus how much arguing about politics;
- the gain by events to a focus are on the subject;
- the breadth and complexity of a topic, so the difficulty level of problem understanding, analysis and solutions, and
- the formation and relative size of coalitions of interest groups on this topic .
Klüver emphasized that lobbying is a complex collective process. So if you only individual lobbyists and their influence sees noticed, perhaps the forest for the trees.
Successful lobbying mostly a joint product, is "solitary Riders "are not the norm. Policy makers almost always see a list of related informal alliances for or against certain positions to. And this group formation depends on the specific issues cut.
Klüver For the recipe for success is simple. If a large number of interest groups stand up for something and a very small number of groups to the contrary, would probably rather listen to the political decision-makers to the larger coalition. The effect is therefore greater, the more interest groups rallied behind a particular position.
It did not matter whether these groups worked together formally, exchanging information and strategies as coordinated - as long as they have a common political goal. Klüver understands so under a lobbying coalition not an official and co-driven alliance, but simply assigns each group a political thrust under one roof. So at least a virtual lobby team.
is crucial, so Kluever, not the absolute number of participating groups, but the relative strength of an alliance in comparison to the strength on the opposite side. An example: When
topic 1, the lobbying coalition A consists of 100 interest groups, the Alliance B of 300th In Theme 2 are 10 stakeholders together in a coalition C and 30 D. In terms of the alliance in absolute size, the lobby coalitions A and B are stronger than C and D. But this is not much, because you must pay attention to the subject: If theme A 1 represents only 25 percent, 75 percent of B, however, the subject of active interest groups. At about 2, it is for C and D as well. The covenants B and D have an influence because of their relative strength advantage.
Sun jib comes to hypothesis (1): The higher the relative size of a lobbying coalition, the greater the likelihood that a member of this coalition can influence the political process.
formulated to complexity of topics jib is just as simple hypothesis (2) : The more complex the issue is, the greater the chance that an interest group can influence the political process. The tougher it is to understand a problem and think through solutions, the more it is opened for the political decision-makers expertise of various stakeholders.
The salience of a theme - that attention and prominence - is not to Klüver constant. Rather, it depends on the relative size of the lobby coalitions - and of course from the bustle of the stakeholders, to create awareness for the topic. Kluver believes that large coalitions particularly benefit from higher salience, since typically more stakeholders to join the dominant coalition. The author writes as hypothesis (3) : The greater the awareness of an issue, the greater the chance of influencing a group if it belongs to the larger lobbying coalition. And vice versa: the chance to exert political influence, be smaller when a group joins the smaller coalition.
is now particularly intense struggle for a subject, policy-makers are drawn with a lot of pressure in different directions. In both ways, there are big headwind. Sun comes to the jib hypothesis (4): The greater the conflict on an issue, the less likely it is to take effect.
The investigation: Entries in online consultations
The four hypotheses examined the author is now using a first quite simple before-after comparison . What comes back (namely, the draft law of the European Commission) is matched with the preferences of the stakeholders.
The before-and-after approach is controversial, as Klüver grants. What between "before" and "after" will happen, it does not state clearly, whether by chance or other factors in addition to the lobbying of interest groups play a role, no one knows. That the Commission has approached the preferences of a lobby, does not necessarily lie on lobbying. Sometimes it was influence, sometimes it was luck. Kluever said, however, when a Commission proposal to the objectives correspond to strong, be this a success for the interest group, or so, and success is more plausibly with influence than can be explained by luck.
There remains the methodological problem of how to capture the specific policy positions on a subject to measure the changes. Here is a quantitative text analysis comes into play.
often allows the Commission eight-week online consultations n . Usually a paper is published by the Commission to respond to the stakeholders and their positions in documents online. The author examines the main paper, the submitted documents of interest and determine whether and how the Law Commission draft Resemblance to this has.
- For this they used a statistical program, which goes by the name Word Fish . This allows the statistics take political positions from text documents. Counted, terms and phrases. Measured the frequency that occur with certain phrases. The program name is a pun on the French word "poisson" (= fish) because it is about the statistical Poisson distribution .
jib is aware that the published consultation documents from the interest groups are quite used strategically, in the background of other channels be used. Nevertheless, she says, the papers are useful because they differed significantly from the actual position of the groups that allow early access and consultation, many stakeholders involved in it. To compare the papers were in all cases: 92 percent of the terms used in the Commission's text, appeared in the papers of the stakeholders.
The extensive preparatory work in coding and mapping of the texts here are not interested to continue (Klüver describes it exactly). Selected from the EU database PreLex topics are from the "first pillar" EU policy (community method), they relate only to EU directives and regulations as well as after the co-decision procedure or advice based instruments between 2000 and 2008. And of course, only those issues dealt with, where there was a public consultation, otherwise the author would not need access to the documents. Of the 57 bills, finally, that appeared likely, however, the jib-sized REACH chemicals regulation from - namely, there was 6000 entries and for economic reasons, the author abandoned the analysis.
gave to the other 56 designs, it nevertheless or 4871 entries. Half rejected the author, focused exclusively on the input from organizations (2,643) and Enterprise (775) , because they are the most active lobbying actors at EU level and also most often involved in online consultations. Short entries and entries that were not written in English landed also in the trash. This selection may not be satisfactory, but in practice is to understand the process. It remained 2696 documents for the analysis .
The operationalization of the explanatory variables is also interesting for non-scientists:
- The relative strength of lobbying coalitions is operationalized simply by the author, the number of interest groups "left" and shared "right" from the original position of the EU Commission by the total number of participating groups.
- The complexity of a topic by three indicators identified: the word count, the number of the draft law designated recitals and the number of articles of the draft
- The salience of a subject measured by the number of entries during the online consultation (for the greater the visibility of. subject, the more stakeholders participate).
- charged The only conflict of a topic, the author so that is shared, the number of interest groups in the smaller coalition lobbying by the number of groups on the opposite side.
- Finally, there is "controlling variables", such as whether it is a amendment to an existing EU legal act or something totally new legislation and what procedure was used. Random effects were also considered.
results
What came out of it now? The data were unruly. According to the theory should complexity and conflictual a political topic have significant effect on whether an interest group can exert influence. The statistics, however denies this - not a relevant variable . Hypotheses 2 and 4 were confirmed.
is contrast, the relative strength of a coalition lobbying statistically significant, the positive relation . So a good result for Hypothesis 1: The greater a lobbying coalition vis-à-vis the other side, the greater the likelihood that its member interest group can influence the draft law of the European Commission. And reinforced the relative size of a coalition lobbying by one count (occurs it added so an interest group) increases, the impact probability on average by around 4 percent.
The chart (below), Kluever is the forecast of how the influence of an interest group compared to the growth of a lobbying coalition behaves ( when all other variables are held constant). clearly understood: Whatever the political issue, the impact on the draft law of the European Commission continues to grow with the relative strength of the alliance comrades
example. grows the relative strength the lobby coalition of 0 (minimum) to 25 meter increases, the influence of chance on average by 11 percent. Comparing two lobby coalitions A (relative intensity 25) and C (50), the probability of exercising influence, is about 19 percent higher for the coalition lobbies in A than in the coalition as
As for the salience of a political issue terms, that the attention and prominence, confirmed Klüver guess. According to the theory is more salience mean more difficulties for the influence of smaller coalitions and lobby easier for large impact. Just as it is, says the statistics. With the advantage of the great Lobbying coalitions with increasing attention to a political issue participation is relatively lower than the disadvantage of the small lobby coalitions.
Klüver Conclusion:
"This has important implications for the lobbying strategies of interest groups: A number of authors have shown that stakeholders aware of the salience of trying to boost a policy issue at to attract additional supporters, and thereby increase their opportunities to influence the outcome of the policy-making process. The empirical analysis shows, however, that this Strategy is only worthwhile for stakeholders, the - members of the dominant coalition lobby - on any subject ever. Stakeholders on the weaker side, thus reducing their chances of actually political influence. "
could be on the methodology criticize some things, but it is Klüver credit for having taken a quantitative, thematic and cross-sectoral investigation into the lobbying influence in attack, where there are mostly single case studies on specific topics. The quantitative analysis is a text interesting approach, even if the instrument has only a small part of the lobby scene under the microscope of science brings .
Klüver confirmed relevant experience and insights from the field - and underscores the value that the policy-makers in Brussels attach to the pooling of interests and European majority Education
The open edges of the complexity and conflictual from. Topics that play no role in the statistics seem to designate that they own - and know that it is precisely these factors after the initial stage of the legislative process, a central role. The more complex and contentious issues is a topic that is, the more likely that a bill of the Commission of the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers is intensely debated, negotiated and changed dramatically. Here, there are also the greatest opportunities for advocacy coalitions, which had been unsuccessful in the initial phase
Klüver rightly says. Lie in the comprehensive analysis of the legislative process for the research with her chosen method for some potential.
source
Kluver, H. (2010, December 6). Lobbying and the issue context: A quantitative analysis of interest group infuence in the European Union. Paper for the Conference Quantifying Europe: Pitfalls and Challenges of Data Generation Processes, Mannheim, 13-14. December 2010. Online at http://www.heike-kluever.com/downloads/Kluever_Lobbying_and_the_issue_context.pdf
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