Content uploaded by Bert Fraussen
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Bert Fraussen on Nov 21, 2017
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
Conceptualising the Policy Engagement of Interest Groups: Involvement, Access
and Prominence*
Accepted for publication in European Journal of Political Research
Halpin, D. and Fraussen, B (2017). Conceptualising the Policy Engagement of
Interest Groups: Involvement, Access and Prominence European Journal of
Political Research. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12194
Darren R. Halpin
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University
darren.halpin@anu.edu.au
Bert Fraussen
Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs
Leiden University
b.fraussen@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Abstract
While much progress has been made in empirically mapping and analysing a variety
of interest group activities in the last decade, less attention has been devoted to
conceptual work that clearly defines and distinguishes different forms of policy
engagement. In this article we contribute to this endeavour by developing a theoretical
framework that explicitly links currently available measures of the policy engagement
of groups to the distinct concepts of group involvement, access and prominence. We
argue that greater conceptual clarity will lead to better accumulation of knowledge in
the sub-field and a better understanding of the role of interest groups in political
systems.
Keywords: Interest Groups, Policy Engagement, Prominence, Access, Involvement
* We wish to acknowledge the financial support from an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant
[DP140104097: The organised interest system in Australian Public Policy]. Earlier versions of this
work were presented at the 2015 meetings of the European Political Science Association and the
Australian Political Science Association and at an invited Interest Group workshop held at the
University of Hamburg, and we thank participants for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts
of this paper. We thank the anonymous reviewers and journal editors for their useful comments which
substantially improved our argument..
2
INTRODUCTION
Contemporary appraisals of the interest group field have emphasised the need to
develop rich sources of systematic data (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Beyers et al.
2008). Scholars have by and large responded (Hojnacki et al. 2012). The proliferation
of data describing national interest groups has fostered a healthy literature
documenting the composition of group populations relevant in politics (e.g.
Binderkrantz et al. 2014; Halpin and Jordan 2012; Johnson 2014; Schlozman et al.
2012). This work has extended to capturing variations in the policy-related activities
of groups. Such data of national groups provide many opportunities to delve deeper
into the relative roles of groups in national politics. When confronted with such data,
one salient question to pose is how can we distinguish meaningful variations in their
policy engagement? As Rasmussen and Carroll rightly highlight, the “social science
literature contains ample warning that even if a range of methods exists for involving
external interests in policy making, external interests still do not necessarily have
equal opportunities to voice their concerns” (2014: 445). Hence, it is important to
look beyond mobilization and population patterns, where bias might be relatively
limited, and focus more closely on later phases of the influence production process,
where more indirect but stronger forms of bias might materialize (Lowery et al.
2015).
1
To address these types of questions, scholars often seek proxies of the relative
importance of particular groups in national politics. While something like ‘influence’
is perhaps the aspiration, various scholars have argued that measures of this concept
are best attempted and most meaningful when assessed at the issue-level
(Baumgartner et al. 2009; Beyers et al. 2014; Binderkrantz et al. 2014; Kluver 2013).
We agree with this point of view, as the assessment of policy influence requires a
high level of contextual knowledge (e.g. a substantive understanding of a policy
issue), as well as the consideration of multiple factors related to the interest
constellation (such as the nature of involved actors, their policy positions and
1
While discussions of “bias” are ubiquitous in the interest group literature, and mostly imply a certain
imbalance in the representation of different societal interests, the absence of a standard against which
to assess bias in normative or empirical terms makes it rather difficult to produce clear-cut conclusions
(for a more detailed discussion see Baumgartner and Leech 1998: chapter 5; Lowery and Gray 2004;
Lowery et al. 2015; Schlozman et al. 2012).
3
lobbying strategies) which typically vary considerably across issues. At the aggregate
level, by contrast, several other measures of policy engagement are available which
can be meaningfully operationalised (Grossman 2012: 85-7). A review of recent work
illustrates that researchers regularly qualify the relative role of groups by referring to
a range of terms including ‘access’, ‘mobilization’, ‘engagement’, ‘contacts’,
‘appearances’ and ‘mentions’.
In this research note, we contribute to this general endeavour by developing a
conceptual framework that enunciates the distinct concepts of involvement, access and
prominence. We clarify the definitions of these concepts, connect them to available
measures, and explore the distinct mechanisms behind them. As will become evident,
our approach does not anticipate new forms or sources of data, instead we highlight
how existing data conventions support the continued study of these concepts. Our
approach constitutes what Adcock and Collier (2001) refer to as ‘friendly
amendments’ to an existing set of scholarly practices. Specifically we aim to develop
a clear ladder of abstraction (Sartori 1970), by unpacking the more generic term of
policy engagement into three distinct concepts situated at a lower level of abstraction:
involvement, access and prominence.
We believe that meticulously elaborating the distinction between these three different
concepts is critical to understanding the varying kinds of group policy engagement, or
different ways in which interest groups can engage with public policy. As argued by
Grossman, for instance “Two organizations may each be able to obtain a meeting [i.e.
access] with an administrator or member of Congress, for example, but those
meetings are unlikely to be equally important if one organization is much more
prominent and more regularly involved” (2012: 88). Likewise, Tresch clarifies that
“while a speech in parliament might be sufficient to make the news once, it hardly is
enough to get more regular coverage and attain some level of prominence in the
media. Conversely, experience and status might not be necessary for occasional
presence in the media, but they certainly seem important to become a frequent
speaker in the media” (2009: 75). In sum, across different political arenas such as
parliament and the media, conceptual distinctions between forms of policy
engagement seem highly relevant.
4
So far, most work on policy engagement has tended to emphasise explaining
variations in the extent to which groups involve themselves, have access, or are
prominent in policy processes. Here, we take a different approach, as we seek to parse
out key conceptual distinctions between different forms of policy engagement. Put
another way, while much of the literature has primarily highlighted the frequency of
engagement and thus emphasizes differences in ‘degree’ (e.g. more or less prominent,
or occasional versus frequent access to policymakers), our contribution aims to
highlight the fundamentally distinct nature of involvement, access and prominence,
hence underlining differences in ‘kind’.
The research note proceeds as follows. The first section reviews existing approaches
to examining the engagement of groups in policymaking. We argue that these existing
approaches might be usefully re-considered as speaking to three distinctive concepts:
involvement, access and prominence. Having clarified these three concepts
theoretically and in terms of possible operationalization, the following section
outlines our expectations regarding the different mechanisms and processes
underpinning them. We conclude by formulating specific suggestions on how
applications of this framework might move the interest group literature forward.
THE POLICY ENGAGEMENT OF INTEREST GROUPS: INVOLVEMENT,
ACCESS AND PROMINENCE
While scholars have used a variety of terms to describe the policy engagement of
groups, we believe that the fundamental differences between these forms can be
accurately captured by three concepts, namely involvement, access, and prominence.
As the first two concepts are relatively well established in the interest group literature,
we will provide a more elaborate discussion of prominence in the following
paragraphs.
In our framework, involvement refers to, for instance, participation in open (or online)
consultations, or the provision of written evidence to legislative committees. In these
cases, groups can literally decide how involved they want to be. For example, if a
group was so minded, it could simply make written submissions (multiple times if it
wished) to legislative committees or administrative consultation processes. As noted
5
by Rasmussen and Carroll when referring to online consultations in the context of the
European Union, “barriers to entry in this form of external actor involvement are
relatively low (…) typically open to everyone (…) and do not require prior invitation”
(2014: 449). At the national level, studies of written responses to administrative
consultations in the UK, letters to parliament in the Netherlands and Denmark and
‘notice and comment’ rulemaking in the US are additional examples of studies that
take as their focus forms of group policy involvement (e.g. Halpin 2011; Pedersen et
al. 2015; Yackee and Yackee 2006).
In our view, it is of critical importance to distinguish involvement from the well-
established concept of access, which Truman considered “the facilitating intermediate
objective of political interest groups” (1951: 264). Access is generally described as
the ability to meet or to exchange information directly with policymakers (Beyers
2002; 2004; Bouwen 2002; 2004). Typical examples of the latter include membership
of closed advisory committees (e.g. Balla and Wright 2001; Binderkrantz and
Christiansen 2015; Fraussen et al. 2015; Rasmussen and Gros 2015) or (invited)
committee hearings (e.g. Leyden 1995; Pedersen et al. 2015). Although much effort
has been devoted to analysing the access of interest groups to policymakers, reflection
on its conceptual meaning has been relatively scarce. In a recent review of the
literature on group access, Binderkrantz et al. (2016: 2) argue its definition and
operationalisation “often rests on an intuitive understanding of what access implies
rather than on explicit definition”. We concur with the definition of access they put
forward: namely that “a group has entered a political arena (parliament,
administration or media) passing a threshold controlled by relevant gatekeepers
(politicians, civil servants, or journalists)”. Critical here is the granting of access by
policymakers: access is something that not all groups have, and it must in some real
sense be won or granted.
Involvement and access thus differ in the extent to which enjoying this form of policy
engagement is at the discretion of a particular group, or depends on a mutual
exchange with (often institutional) gatekeepers. Our third concept of policy
engagement, prominence, is a term that has been used in general discourse, but rarely
has been clearly defined. We use the term here to designate the taken-for-grantedness
a group enjoys among a given audience (e.g. MPs, government officials or
6
journalists). In this way it shares the approach of Taylor and Fiske (1978) who deploy
this term to characterise the degree to which something is ‘top of mind’.
2
Prominence undeniably exists aside a range of similar, yet distinctive concepts. For
instance, consider the concept of visibility. It is often used to indicate the degree to
which an agent attracts the attention of an audience. We accept that a group, which is
highly visible (is talked about a lot), may also be prominent. But we can also imagine
that some groups will be prominent with policymakers but not highly visible. For that
reason we do not consider prominence and visibility to be equivalent; whereas
visibility merely involves the frequency at which a group is mentioned, prominence
also takes into account how and why political elites refer to a particular group. For
instance, one reason a group might be prominent is that it has a strong reputation for
being influential; this is well captured in the notion of ‘influence reputation’ (Knoke
1988; Heaney 2014). Additionally, policy scholars talk about the role of perceived
expertise and trustworthiness, which has been termed ‘epistemic authority’
(Kruglanski et al. 2009; see also Doberstein 2016), as a possible driver for
prominence. We consider these (and related) concepts to be sub-types of prominence.
The key point here is that we deploy prominence deliberately, and imbue it with a
specific and distinct meaning vis-à-vis concepts that might immediately come to mind
as candidates for the same underlying phenomenon.
Prominence is different from involvement and access in the sense that is largely a
result of how external actors (and political elites in particular) perceive and
acknowledge a group. The notion of prominence captures the idea that groups vary
with respect to how preeminent they are as voices for a particular constituency among
political elites, and thus refers to the situation whereby some groups are simply
assumed to be relevant to the issue at hand. Thus, rather than emphasizing a group’s
role in a particular policy process, for which the concepts of involvement and access
seem highly appropriate, high levels of prominence are considered indicative of the
taken-for-grantedness of a group as the voice for a particular constituency or
viewpoint. We suggest that a limited number of groups become synonymous with – or
2
Our usage finds agreement with the way Grossman (2012) defines the concept – as taken-for-
grantedness, but departs in its operationalization (his measure of raw group mentions is what we would
define as visibility, see below).
7
placeholders for – a constituency or issue perspective, which means that they stand in
for, say, ‘business’, ‘workers, ‘farmers’ or ‘civil liberties’. As Grossman accurately
observes, only a select few groups become prominent, even though many other
organizations “make the same representative claims, derive their support from similar
constituencies, and compete for attention from the same set of policymakers. Yet
reporters and policymakers do not regularly seek out their views” (Grossman 2012:
7). There is a hierarchy, which implies that within each policy sector, or group
system, only a few groups get to enjoy high levels of prominence among political
elites, even though there are often groups around that provide close organizational
equivalents, with similar organizational structures and constituencies.
Table 1. Conceptual Distinctions
Concept
Description
Operationalised as…
Involvement
Refers to the extent of
contacts made by a group to
policymakers and institutions.
The group can decide whether
(and how intense or frequent)
to be involved.
Contact by a group with
policymakers or institutions
which is at the discretion of
the group.
Access
Where a group is granted
contact with policymakers or
institutions. It is something
that not all groups have and it
must in some real sense be
‘won’ or ‘granted’.
Contact by a group with
policymakers or institutions
which is at the discretion of the
policymaker or institution.
Prominence
Where a group has pre-
eminence for a particular
constituency or viewpoint,
and is therefore “taken-for-
granted” by a prescribed
audience
Recognition or favourable
notice of a group by
policymakers.
To summarise, in previous work, several authors have used a variety of terms to
describe the policy engagement of groups. Our aim here is to clarify the range of
labels already in some kind of use (i.e. familiarity), such that their distinctive nature
and measurement are well defined (i.e. differentiation) (e.g. Gerring 2012). Therefore,
we consider our suggestions to be “friendly amendments” to the existing literature, as
they “do not fundamentally challenge a systematized concept but instead push
analysts to capture more adequately the ideas contained in it” (Adcock and Collier
8
2001: 533). We believe the theoretical framework offered here provides a more
parsimonious approach towards assessing the role of groups in political systems as it
underlines fundamental differences in kind rather than degree concerning the policy
engagement of groups, which will aid conceptual clarity in our research practices as
well as facilitate comparative work and further accumulation of knowledge on these
fundamental concepts. Thus far, theories and approaches in our sub-field have mostly
tended to focus on access (often as a kind of proxy for influence), but we believe
involvement and prominence are equally important to understand the role of interest
groups in policymaking.
IDENTIFYING THE MECHANISMS AND PROCESSES THAT DRIVE
INVOLVEMENT, ACCESS AND PROMINENCE
In the previous section, we identified three concepts – involvement, access and
prominence – that capture distinguishable facets of group engagement with
policymakers. The implication is that each concept might well be explained by a
distinctive mechanism or process. In developing expectations about what might
explain variation across measures of these concepts, we necessarily must outline a
theoretical framework to go alongside them. In this section we develop more specific
expectations, based on an account of the different mechanisms underpinning each
concept. In short, we argue that conscious effort by groups appears to largely drive
involvement, whereas access is more likely to be the result of a two-party exchange.
While the involvement and access of groups might vary considerably from issue to
issue, we assume prominence to be a more permanent and thus more stable feature of
groups, as it relates to the acknowledgement they receive from important audiences, in
particular political elites.
Table 2 summarises the key mechanism we argue underpins each concept, and
provides a summary of expectations that derive from it.
9
Table 2. Mechanisms and Processes Driving Involvement, Access and Prominence
Concepts
Primary
Mechanism
Description and Expectations
Key explanatory
variables/processes
Involvement
Effort
The degree to which a group
becomes involved in policy is
down to the effort a group is
willing or able to expend. At the
extreme, it is logically bounded
by resource levels.
Resource variables
ought to be significant
Access
Exchange
The degree to which a group
gains access is explained by the
outcome of the exchange
between policymakers and the
group. While groups can
generate capabilities that will
shape their ‘value’ to
policymakers, it is also the
policymakers’ needs and
preferences that shape the
granting of access.
Variables related to
political capacity
ought to be significant
Resource variables
will shape this
indirectly (as they
may well dictate the
extent to which
desired capacities or
policy goods can be
generated)
Prominence
Acknowledgement
The degree to which a group
attains prominence is the
outcome of processes through
which policymakers come to
associate a given constituency
with a particular group (or set
of groups). The (repeated)
performance of this coupling
embeds and positively
reinforces the group’s
prominence.
Most explanatory
variables are located
in the audience
dynamic, and not in
the group itself.
In our view involvement is something that is in the agency of groups to decide – how
much effort to put into contacting specific political actors or institutions. As such, the
level of resources available to a group ought to signify some kind of absolute limit on
involvement. At the same time, the level of involvement is likely to be related to
strategic choices of groups (for instance, prioritizing some political venues or actors
over others), as well as its particular policy agenda or issue interests. As regards the
latter, we expect groups with a general orientation, such as peak business or labour
groups, to demonstrate higher levels of involvement across a range of policy domains,
whereas the involvement of specialised industry groups will be much more narrow
and targeted (even though both are successful in getting involved) (e.g. Halpin and
Thomas 2012).
10
Given that access is at the behest of government officials, members of parliament or
legislative committee clerks, we expect that it will be most related to variables that
indicate a manifest desire to invest in political capacities (such as hiring a commercial
lobbyist, or making investments in policy research and analysis) and to demonstrate
societal support (for instance through a large number of members). The mechanism of
exchange is primary here, which implies that groups possess ‘policy goods’ which
policymakers value (Bouwen 2002, 2004; Braun 2012; Maloney et al. 1994: 36;
Halpin 2014; Tallberg et al. 2015). These policy goods can relate to policy expertise,
but can equally involve the societal legitimacy of a group, its capacity to implement
policy or its ability to shape public opinion.
Unlike involvement and access, we argue that prominence is not something that
groups can easily achieve in the short run. Put another way, groups can add more
effort to generate higher levels of involvement, they can develop certain ‘access
goods’ that might prompt policymakers to engage in an exchange with them, but in
terms of prominence various factors external to the group come into play. By way of
analogy, scholars talk of issue salience, as it is commonly accepted that what makes
an issue prominent is nothing intrinsic to the issue (health is not more intrinsically
salient than say education), but is explained by endogenous processes within the
audience that drives recognition of an issue relative to others (Wlezien 2005).
We argue that processes of acknowledgment that occur within the ‘audience’ with
which a given a group is seeking to engage, drive variations in prominence. Evidence
of this process can be drawn by the way elites utilize specific groups as reference
points in making arguments about policy matters. Thus, we see the practice whereby
Ministers or journalists will interchangeably refer to the ‘farm lobby’ and the National
Farmers Union, or the ‘environment movement’ and Greenpeace. Drawing analogies
with the literature regarding the scarcity of attention and information processing (see
Jones and Baumgartner 2005 for a general approach in a public policy context; Jones
2003 for a discussion of choice in decision-making), we argue that since a given
audience cannot be intimately familiar with all groups in a given population, they will
look for short-cuts or heuristics when seeking to depict a particular set of interests. As
regards processes that produce this ‘aura of inevitability’, explanations often focus on
terms as “major players”, “credibility”, “critical constituency” or “ a taken-for-
11
granted role in the process” (Grossman 2012: chapter 6). There is an assumption here
that the capacity for a given audience to discern and sift among groups to decide
which groups to acknowledge – or give prominence to – will differ. For instance, we
might expect the general public will monitor and filter political activities in different
ways as compared to legislators, or political journalists.
CONCLUSION
This paper has put forward the proposition that the various measures currently used to
analyse the policy engagement of groups can be meaningfully captured through our
proposed theoretical framework. Reviewing the literature, there seems to be a solid
foundation for more clearly and consciously distinguishing among the three concepts
of involvement, access and prominence, each driven by different mechanisms and
processes. This research note has sought to demonstrate the inherent value in
untangling these usages and retrieving what are valuable concepts. It is our contention
that the welcome rapid shift to counting and mapping interest group policy
engagement has heightened the need to reflect on conceptual precision and, in some
cases, to parse out measures and concepts that currently appear to be used
interchangeably, or are not explicitly articulated. While measures related to these
concepts are increasingly utilized, it is less common to explicitly specify in which
respects they vary in substantive meaning, or are driven by different processes.
This intervention is motivated by the view that we can capitalise best on the welcome
rapid response to calls for more data if we take some moments to pause and consider
how the measures being reported relate to existing concepts in the field (as well as
considering if existing concepts adequately cover new sources of data). As is argued
more broadly for the social sciences, more data may not mean more knowledge
accumulation, unless due attention is paid to conceptual matters (Adcock and Collier
2001; Gerring 2012). Interest group studies are, of course, no different. This
conceptual disambiguation will have two benefits. Firstly, by fostering agreed syntax
for commonly collected measures, existing findings will be more readily ingested by
the scholarly community. Secondly, conceptual consistency – and its link to
commonly agreed measures – will encourage better causal theories.
12
Our discussion also offers clear directions with respect to the design of empirical
work. One fruitful research design approach is to look at how single concepts – say
prominence – map across arenas (see Binderkrantz et al. 2015; Boehmke et al. 2013).
Based on existing work, we might expect groups to have varying prominence levels
across different arenas (see work on the media and judicial arena e.g. Bouwen and
McCown 2007). For instance, as the carrying capacity of these arenas differs, the
number of groups achieving prominence (or access/involvement) could vary
considerably (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988). Relatedly, the variations in the
informational needs and preferences of different audiences (policymakers, journalists,
and judges, for instance) might also help to clarify different patterns of policy
engagement in different arenas.
Accepting that these concepts measure different things, another important question
involves the relationship between the concepts we identified. While there might be a
positive association between involvement, access and prominence, this is an empirical
question that requires more research. It seems likely that as group seeks more
involvement in policymaking, its chances of gaining access increase. Yet, we can also
imagine cases where the opposite dynamic may occur. That is, some groups might be
prominent among policymakers, even though they rarely involve themselves in
policymaking; likewise being granted access does not necessarily imply that a group
is “taken-for-granted” by political elites. Future work in this area surely will assist us
in unravelling these links in greater detail.
13
References
Adcock, R., & Collier, D. (2001). Measurement validity: A shared standard for
qualitative and quantitative research. American Political Science Review, 95(3), 529-
546.
Balla, S. J., & Wright, J. R. (2001). Interest groups, advisory committees, and
congressional control of the bureaucracy. American Journal of Political Science,
45(4), 799-812.
Baumgartner, F. R., Berry, J. M., Hojnacki, M., Kimball, D. C., & Leech, B. L.
(2009). Lobbying and policy change: Who wins, who loses, and why. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Baumgartner, F. R., & Leech, B. L. (1998). Basic interests: The importance of groups
in Politics and Political Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Beyers, J. (2002). Gaining and seeking access: The European adaptation of domestic
interest associations. European Journal of Political Research, 41(5), 585-612.
Beyers, J. (2004). Voice and access - Political practices of European interest
associations. European Union Politics, 5(2), 211-240.
Beyers, J., Chaques Bonafont, L., Dur, A., Eising, R., Fink-Hafner, D., Lowery, D.,
Naurin, D. (2014). The INTEREURO Project: Logic and structure. Interest Groups
and Advocacy, 3(2), 126-140.
Beyers, J., Eising, R., & Maloney, W. (2008). Conclusion: Embedding interest group
research. West European Politics, 31(6), 1292-1302.
Binderkrantz, A. S., Christiansen, P. M., & Pedersen, H. H. (2014). A Privileged
position? The influence of business interests in government consultations. Journal of
Public Administration Research and Theory, 24(4), 879-896.
Binderkrantz, A. S., & Christiansen, P. M. (2015). From classic to modern
corporatism. Interest group representation in Danish public committees in 1975 and
2010. Journal of European Public Policy, 22(7), 1022-1039.
Binderkrantz, A., Christiansen, P. M., & Pedersen, H. H. (2015). Interest group access
to the bureaucracy, parliament, and the media, Governance, 28(1), 95-112.
Binderkrantz, A., Pedersen, H., & Beyers, J. (2016). What is access? A discussion of
the definition and measurement of interest group access. European Political Science.
doi: 10.1057/eps.2016.17.
Boehmke, F. J., Gailmard, S., & Patty, J. W. (2013). Business as usual: interest group
access and representation across policy-making venues. Journal of Public Policy,
33(01), 3-33.
14
Bouwen, P. (2002). Corporate lobbying in the European Union: the logic of access.
Journal of European Public Policy, 9(3), 365-390.
Bouwen, P. (2004). Exchanging access goods for access: A comparative study of
business lobbying in the European Union institutions. European Journal of Political
Research, 43(3), 337-369.
Bouwen, P., & McCown, M. (2007). Lobbying versus litigation: political and legal
strategies of interest representation in the European Union. Journal of European
Public Policy, 14(3), 422-443.
Braun, C. (2012). The captive or the broker? Explaining public agency-interest group
interactions. Governance, 25(2), 291-314.
Doberstein, C. (2016). Whom Do Bureaucrats Believe? A Randomized Controlled
Experiment Testing Perceptions of Credibility of Policy Research. Policy Studies
Journal. doi: 10.1111/psj.12166
Fraussen, B., Beyers, J., & Donas, T. (2015). The Expanding Core and Varying
Degrees of Insiderness: Institutionalised Interest Group Access to Advisory Councils.
Political Studies, 63(3), 569-588.
Gerring, J. (2012). Social science methodology: A unified framework, Cambridge
University Press, New York.
Grossmann, M. (2012). The not-so-special interests: Interest groups, public
representation, and American governance. Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press.
Halpin, D., and Jordan, A. G. (2012). The scale of interest organization in democratic
politics : data and research methods. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Halpin, D., and Thomas, H. (2012). Evaluating the Breadth of Policy Engagement by
Organized Interests. Public Administration, 90(3), 582-599.
Halpin. D. (2011) ‘Organized Interests and Cascades of Attention: Unpacking Policy
Bandwagon Dynamics’ Governance, 24(2), 205-30.
Halpin, D. (2014). The Organization of Political Interest Groups: Designing
Advocacy, Routledge, Abingdon.
Heaney, M. T. (2014). Multiplex networks and interest group influence reputation: An
exponential random graph model. Social Networks, 36, 66-81.
Hilgartner, S., and Bosk, C. L. (1988). The Rise and Fall of Social Problems: A
Public Arenas Model. American Journal of Sociology, 94(1), 53-78
Hojnacki, M., Kimball, D. C., Baumgartner, F., Berry, J. M., & Leech, B. L. (2012).
Studying Organizational advocacy and influence: Reexamining interest group
research. Annual Review of Political Science, 15, 379-399.
15
Johnson, E. W. (2014). Toward international comparative research on associational
activity: Variation in the form and focus of voluntary associations in four nations.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 43(2 suppl), 163S-181S.
Jones, B.D. (2003). Bounded rationality and political science: Lessons from public
administration and public policy. Journal of Public Administration Research and
Theory, 13(4), 395-412.
Jones, B.D. and F.R. Baumgartner (2005). The politics of attention, Chicago
University Press, Chicago.
Kluver, H. (2013). Lobbying in the European Union: Interest groups, lobbying
coalitions and policy change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Knoke, D. (1998). Who steals my purse steals trash - The structure of organizational
influence reputation. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 10(4), 507-530.
Kruglanski, A. W., Dechesne, M., Orehek, E., & Pierro, A. (2009). Three decades of
lay epistemics: The why, how, and who of knowledge formation. European Review of
Social Psychology, 20(1), 146-191.
Leyden, K. M. (1995). Interest Group Resources and Testimony at Congressional
Hearings. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 20(3), 431-439.
Lowery, D., and V. Gray. 2004. "Bias in the heavenly chorus - Interests in society and
before government." Journal of Theoretical Politics 16(1):5-29.
Lowery, D., Baumgartner, F., Berkhout, J., Berry, J. M., Halpin, D., Hojnacki, M.,
Schlozman, K. L. (2015). Images of an unbiased interest system. Journal of European
Public Policy, 22 (8), 1212-1231.
Maloney, W., Jordan, G., & McLaughlin, M. (1994). Interest groups and public
policy: The insider/outsider model revisited. Journal of Public Policy, 14(1), 17-38.
Pedersen, H., Halpin, D. and Rasmussen, A. (2015). Who gives evidence to
parliamentary committees? A comparative investigation of parliamentary committees
and their constituencies, Journal of Legislative Studies, 21 (3), 408-427.
Rasmussen, A., and Carroll, B. J. (2014). Determinants of upper-class dominance in
the heavenly chorus: Lessons from European Union online consultations. British
Journal of Political Science, 44(2), 445-459.
Rasmussen, A., and Gross, V. (2015). Biased access? Exploring selection to advisory
committees. European Political Science Review, 7(3), 343-372.
Sartori, G. (1970) Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics, American Political
Science Review, 64(4),1033-53.
16
Schlozman, K. L., Verba, S., and Brady, H. E. (2012). The unheavenly chorus:
unequal political voice and the broken promise of American democracy. Princeton;
Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Tallberg, J., Dellmuth, L. M., Agné, H., & Duit, A. (2015). NGO Influence in
International Organizations: Information, Access and Exchange. British Journal of
Political Science, 1-26. doi: 10.1017/S000712341500037X
Taylor, S.E. and Fiske, S.T. (1975). Point of view and perceptions of causality.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37: 356-367.
Tresch, A. (2009). Politicians in the Media: Determinants of Legislators' Presence and
Prominence in Swiss Newspapers. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 14(1),
67-90.
Truman, D. B. (1951). The governmental process; political interests and public
opinion. New York: Knopf.
Wlezien, C. (2005). On the salience of political issues: The problem with ‘most
important problem’. Electoral Studies, 24(4), 555-579.
Yackee, J. and Yackee, S. (2006). ‘A Bias Towards Business? Assessing Interest
Group Influence on the U.S. Bureaucracy.’ The Journal of Politics 68 (1):128-39.
