In an ideal world, lobbyists would help ensure that the government placed issues on the political agenda that were of particular importance to the general populace. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart are collaborating with teams from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the USA to assess the extent to which lobbyists in the real world actually do represent citizens’ interests.
Some of the underlying axioms of democracy are that the will of the people is expressed in elections, parliaments and laws. At the same time, a plethora of associations, clubs and initiatives make it their business to evangelize citizens’ preferences and influence politicians accordingly. The barriers to forming such organizations are very low. According to Professor Patrick Bernhagen, current holder of the Political Systems and Political Sociology Professorship at the University of Stuttgart: “according to the old adage ‘to look after yourself is to look after everyone’ all demographic groups should be properly represented in such a system. However, the question is whether or not this is done fairly”. Findings from the political scientist’s earlier studies raise doubts.
Advocate – For Whom?
According to the results of a survey conducted in 2012, supposedly strong and well-organized interest groups, such as the industrial sector, find it difficult to have their demands reflected in legislation, particularly at the EU level. Environmental and consumer groups, on the other hand, are often very successful. At the time of publication, this report was met with indignation, as the findings were in conflict with the commonly accepted negative view of lobbyism that continues to this day. This eventually led to the idea of gathering sound empirical evidence about the role played by lobbyists and checking whether their negative image is justified, which, in turn, resulted in the three-year research project “Agendas and Interest Groups” (AIG), which will continue to be funded by the European Open Research Area (ORA) till 2019.
The ORA is a collaboration between European funding bodies in which the German research community also participates. ORA projects usually involve universities from three to four European countries. Up to now, it has been possible to involve both US-American and Japanese researchers via the United Kingdom. In addition to the Stuttgart team, the AIG project involves research groups headed by Dr. Joost Berkhout (Amsterdam), Dr. Adam Chalmers (London), Professor Beth Leech (Rutgers, USA) and Dr. Amy McKay (Exeter, UK). The focus of the AIG project has shifted in comparison with earlier projects: instead of continuing to ask who comes out on top, it looks at what the various actors are talking about. “What we want to know”, says Bernhagen, “is whether lobby groups in the various countries actually represent the diversity of popular interests or if they simply involve themselves in spurious debates”.
Social Issues, Renting, Security
In an attempt to answer this question, as Bernhagen explains, the researchers are banking on outcome impartiality and curiosity”. First, 1000 people in each of the participating countries were asked to state what the most pressing issue is, from their respective perspectives, that politicians need to resolve. Whilst the responses have not yet been fully evaluated, they are - at least for Germany - hardly surprising at first glance: at the top of the list are socio-political issues such as old-age pensions, education and, as always, the refugee question.
At the same time, 100 lobbyists from various diverse groups are providing the researchers with information about the issues they are currently working on. As expected, their responses are significantly more detailed, depend strongly on the structure of the given association and encompass a lot of highly partisan issues. But certain themes that are also of interest to the broader public, such as the digitization of the workplace and climate change, were also addressed. However, rendering the responses from the public and lobbyists comparable presents a challenge, to which end a coding scheme has been devised to categorize the responses under a limited number of topic headings. In this way, the researchers want to filter out the nine topics most often addressed by the various interest groups. The general populace will then be surveyed with reference to these “popular” topics in a second survey round. Sticking to the subject, how important is climate change to the general public and where do they see themselves between economy and ecology in the relevant context? “We’ll probably get different responses from Daimler employees and members of the Green Party”, Bernhagen supposes.
“Brexit” and Trump Dominate the Foreign Headlines
A cross-border comparison between the participating countries is made more difficult by the fact that current crises strongly affect perceptions of important topics. Such “irritations” are weighted very differently from one country to the next. As Bernhagen explains: “The so-called ‘Brexit’ movement is currently occupying people’s minds in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump is the main subject of conversation in the USA. Other topics are relegated to the background as a result”. However, the researchers’ original concern that the survey would not reveal a sufficient degree of variance has not proved to be an issue: “a lot more topics were addressed”. The study aspires to go beyond the obligatory lobbyist debate and has normative features. “If we can estimate the extent of the discrepancy between the issues of interest to the lobby groups and the general public”, says Bernhagen, “then we’ll be able to draw conclusions about the extent to which organized interest groups really represent the hopes and fears of the populace, which, ultimately, reflects upon the state of our democracy”. The comparative representativeness, and therefore quality, of lobbying between countries is recognizable from the data. In addition, the coding system reveals the extent to which specific legislative agendas, for example in relation to the coalition agreement, truly reflect the preferences of the general public.
Whilst the researchers have no plans to make concrete recommendations to politicians based on this baseline survey, it does have practical implications. Depending on the results, says Bernhagen with a wink, politicians could conclude that they don’t have to take the bowing and scraping of lobbyists too seriously, “or, conversely, that they’ll have to take lobbyists much more seriously in future”.
Andrea Mayer-Grenu