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Ideally, interest groups form a link between citizens and politics. However, this link is often flawed in practice. Many citizens also feel that the average citizen is not heard and that special interests exert undue influence on policymaking. One proposal to address this problem is the stimulation of so-called citizen lobby: Ordinary citizens can use lobbying strategies to achieve influence on decision-makers. This benefits both policymakers and citizens as it can empower citizens to make their voices heard and it can help policymakers to build perceived legitimacy among citizens that are dissatisfied with existing decision-making processes. Formal channels for citizen lobby often exist but remain underused. However, what happens when governments actively engage with citizen lobby? We conducted two survey experiments in the Netherlands (N = 1218) and showed that engagement with citizen lobby has no systematic effect on internal political efficacy but has robust positive effects on political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central theories of public policy imply that lobbying is demand‐driven, meaning highly responsive to the levels of access that political gatekeepers offer to interest organizations. Others stress drivers at the supply side, especially the severity of disturbances which affect an organization's constituency. We test these central arguments explaining lobbying activities in a comparative survey experiment conducted in 10 polities in Europe. Our treatments vary the severity of two types of external threats faced by interest organizations: (1) barriers that restrict their access to decision‐makers and (2) disturbances that compromise an organization's interests. We operationalize these threats at the demand and supply side of lobbying based on an (at that point) hypothetical second wave of COVID‐19. Our findings show that while severe access barriers trigger a flight response, whereby groups suspend their lobbying activities and divert to protest actions, higher disturbances mobilize groups into a fight mode, in which organizations spend more lobbying resources and intensify different outside lobbying activities. Our study serves novel causal evidence on the important dynamic relationship between policy disturbances, political access and lobbying strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a high degree of conflict and a low degree of salience on a policy issue drives corporations to lobby alone rather than via a business association. Previous research has addressed drivers at organizational, sector and structural level. This paper adds an issue perspective. These arguments are important as democracies thrive when business employs its power in a responsible manner. When corporations lobby alone, it can be a challenge to do so as they tend to overlook long‐term interests of the broader business community and society. The arguments are tested for the first time in a corporatist context through an original survey experiment among corporate lobbyists in Germany and the Netherlands. The study finds support for the expectation on conflict, which is striking as it indicates that corporations prefer to lobby alone due to conflict even in contexts in which they are not incentivized to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of Covid-19 provoked a massive shock for political institutions and societal groups. A crucial question is how such an external event affects the balance of access to political gatekeepers. In particular: Are organizations, which are highly affected by the crisis, able to increase their political voice? To address this, we focus on changes in lobbying access to key venues of public policy: government, parliament, the bureaucracy, and the media across 10 European democracies. Based on novel survey data, we assess changes in access shortly after the outbreak of Covid-19. Our findings show that affectedness is an important driver of changes in access to all venues. We interpret this as good news for the functioning of European systems of interest representation, and the ability of gatekeepers to open their doors to affected groups. However, we also show that the effect of affectedness varies considerably for economic and non-economic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how corporations appear in media coverage on six policy domains through a complexity lens in two major British newspapers between 2012 and 2017. Corporations are often thought to avoid press coverage, though another strand of literature indicates that they dominate the news compared to other organized interests. We argue that corporations use multiple lobby strategies including media strategies in order to maximize influence. They do so to signal technical expertise to specific constituencies that is not necessarily accessible to the general public. The results show that corporations are more likely to be involved in news coverage that is technical in nature which is an important finding as it tells us more about the media involvement of key players in the political process. Yet, this coverage is not necessarily less accessible which is a positive finding for the functioning of our democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the presence of interest organizations in political news in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands between 1990 and 2017. Previous research on organized interests in the media revealed (1) a consistent overrepresentation of business interests across countries, but (2) also that this overrepresentation has decreased over time in a European context. However, these studies are snapshots of interest group patterns with either cross-country or longitudinal variation, and important players such as corporations have been largely excluded by European scholars. We argue that including corporations affects previous conclusions as it reveals substantial differences across countries and an increasing role of business interests in the news. We use a data set of Dutch and British news articles, in which we identified 34,657 interest organizations. This endeavor highlights that the distribution of organized interests in the media is skewed toward business interests and has not become more diverse. This suggests that the important insider role of business interests translates to outsider venues, which tells us something about how the news media maintain these patterns through the construction of news stories. These findings interfere with ideas of representativeness and flourishing democracies with a diverse public debate in which many different voices are expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses patterns in interest group access to the political process in the Netherlands from 1970 to 2017. Research has indicated that corporations are amongst the most frequent participants in contemporary political systems. Yet such research has had a strong focus on the US, leaving a gap in our knowledge of corporate lobbying within Europe. This study demonstrates for the first time in a European context that, in contrast to several decades ago, corporations have managed to increase their access to the political process. In doing so, the article tests a new approach that identifies large-scale interest group populations. The method shows itself to be reliable and can therefore be useful for other scholars. The explanatory model indicates that corporate access increases when the economy weakens and political opportunities increase. Overall, the article demonstrates that business interests have managed to expand their access, contributing to a fragmented interest group system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum article provides an overview of the sampling and survey design of the publicly available InterCov dataset. The two-wave cross-country survey includes items on lobbying mobilisation, strategies, access and influence after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and other measures of organisational factors. We discuss design choices considering our interest in lobbying dynamics following a focusing event, the responsiveness of organisations and political gatekeepers to external shocks, and the role of timing in lobbying. We address our bottom-up sampling approach, draw lessons from the implementation of a second survey wave and provide an overview of survey items. We hope that this forum article is useful for scholars aiming to use our dataset and those starting new data collection efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]