TY - JOUR

T1 - Fight or flight

T2 - How access barriers and interest disruption affect the activities of interest organizations

AU - Junk, Wiebke Marie

AU - Crepaz, Michele

AU - Aizenberg, Ellis

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors. European Journal of Political Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research.

PY - 2023/10/9

Y1 - 2023/10/9

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - access

KW - disturbance

KW - experiments

KW - interest groups

KW - lobbying

KW - lobbying

KW - interest groups

KW - experiments

KW - access

KW - disturbance

U2 - 10.1111/1475-6765.12630

DO - 10.1111/1475-6765.12630

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85173929351

JO - European Journal of Political Research

JF - European Journal of Political Research

SN - 0304-4130

ER -