Government, interest groups and incrementalism

Abstract. This paper is concerned with the two underlying dimensions of the people's welfare – economic growth and social protection – and their realization in the diverse processes which determine the character of budgeting and of budgetary outcomes. These conflicting conceptions of welfare and the diverse agents involved in the budgetary process generate a government fiscal policy, which expresses the clash between ideology and political feasibility and between politicians' intentions and actual outcomes. This paper focuses primarily on the budgetary process in West Germany, but also makes some reference to fiscal policy in the UK and the USA.     

Ideology and interest groups

This paper analyzes the interaction between ideological shirking by legislators and interest group activities in a two stage game between a legislator, a challenger, and an interest group. Some comparative statics results are derived. In some circumstances, campaign contributions decrease as the legislator shirks more; they increase with committee power and seniority, other things equal. An empirical test provides some support for this model. The interpretation of those results is made difficult by the methodological problems of ideological shirking measures. It is problematic to interpret the standard residual as ideological shirking because it ignores the effect of campaign contributions on legislative voting.     

Social capital, lobbying and community-based interest groups

Recent discussions of social capital within the public choice literature have tended to focus on its role in solving collective action problems and promoting political accountability. Consequently, two areas of inquiry remain underexplored: (1) the role social capital plays in facilitating lobbying and rent seeking, and (2) the possibility that the availability of government resources can cause community-based groups to re-orient their stocks of social capital away from mutual assistance and toward lobbying and rent seeking. This article examines the relationship between social capital and lobbying in New Orleans??s post-Katrina recovery.     

The courts,interest groups,and public opinion about abortion

Public preferences about the availability of abortion under various circumstances have remained fairly stable over time. Yet a standard CBS/New York Times abortion question indicates that a significant shift in opinion occurred during the 1980s, whereby the public became increasingly supportive of legalized abortion as it is now. These very different patterns of public opinion about abortion suggest that the public perceived a shift in the abortion status quo, toward more restricted access, over time, and became more supportive of current abortion policy.A model of support for legalized abortion as it is now is developed that incorporates the influences of court activities and interest-group behavior. The analysis indicates that the public reacted directly to the activities of the courts, becoming more supportive of current abortion policy in response to media coverage of court cases that challenged the abortion status quo and Supreme Court nominations and confirmations. Although absolute preferences remained largely unchanged, it appears the public perceived an increasing threat to the status quo and became correspondingly less enamored with further restrictions on the availability of abortion.     

Are they listening? Public opinion,interest groups and government responsiveness

What is the role of interest groups in the transmission of issues between the public and government policy? While government responsiveness to voters has received widespread scholarly attention, little is known about the role of interest groups in the transmission of public opinion to government. It is argued here that interest groups importantly influence government responsiveness to public opinion, but that the effect varies by type of interest group: while cause groups increase the responsiveness of governments to their electorate, sectional groups decrease government responsiveness. Drawing on a new and unique dataset, this article examines the relationship between public opinion, interest groups and government expenditure across 13 policy areas in Germany from 1986 until 2012 and shows that interest groups indeed have a differential effect on the responsiveness of governments. The article’s findings have important implications for understanding political representation and the largely overlooked relationship between public opinion, interest groups and government policy.     

Conceptualising the policy engagement of interest groups: Involvement,access and prominence

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. This article contributes 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. It argues 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.     

Power groups,interests and interest groups in consolidated and transitional democracies: comparing Uruguay and Costa Rica with Paraguay and Haiti

Drawing on a representative sample of four countries, this article compares two related aspects of interest group activity across Latin America. First, it identifies the elements that determine the level of interest group system development and types of group activity across the region; and second it provides insights into the relationship of the level of institutionalization of a group system to the extent of the consolidation of democracy. The representative sample is composed of Uruguay and Costa Rica in comparison with Paraguay and Haiti. These are four countries with small populations that cover the spectrum of levels of socioeconomic and political development across Latin America, from Uruguay, one of the most developed, to Haiti one of the least developed. The article argues that across a spectrum of group development in Latin America, advanced systems have more or less integrated characteristics, whereas less developed ones manifest a dual or bifurcated group activity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

论中国利益群体参与公共政策制定存在的问题

处于社会转型期的中国,如何处理利益群体参政问题关乎改革开放的历史进程和社会稳定。中国的渐进式改革路径在保持社会稳定方面发挥了重要的作用,但是这种渐进式改革更多地表现在经济领域,而政治领域的改革,特别是公民参政权的落实则略显迟滞和不够。由此引起的矛盾和问题使人们产生了诸多不满和怨恨,因此探讨中国利益群体在参与公共政策制定上存在的问题,对于进一步完善中国利益群体参政的路径、提高政府的执政能力和管理创新能力,其理论价值和现实意义不言而喻。     

Constraint in European party activists' sympathy scores for interest groups

Abstract. This paper presents an analysis, country by country, of sympathy scores given by European party activists from 58 political parties in 11 countries of the European Community to more than 100 different national interest groups. In all countries but one, the left-right dimension is the predominant criterion for interpreting the sympathy scores given. In Belgium, the exception, a regional (Flemish-Walloon) cleavage line is most important. The analyses were performed with a new adapted version of the unidimensional Coombsian unfolding model. Bad fit to the unidimensional model is not remedied by postulating additional common dimensions, but by identifying and removing stimuli (interest groups) that do not conform to the unidimensional unfolding model. The nonrepresentability of these stimuli can be attributed to lack of agreement among activists about the location of these stimuli on the left-right dimension. More specifically, certain relatively popular stimuli are perceived by most respondents as close to their own location on the left-right scale, and, conversely, certain relatively unpopular stimuli are perceived by most respondents as distant from their own location.     

Common-property resources: privatization, centralization, and hybrid arrangements

This paper highlights Elinor Ostrom’s innovative and important work on common-property resources (CPRs), which helped earn her the Nobel Prize in Economics. In particular, she showed that neither privatization nor centralization necessarily would fix resource misallocation in CPRs. Ostrom recognized that common owners often developed effective governance that limited access to the CPR and promoted efficient transfers among generations. Through myriad approaches, she identified factors that foster efficient governance in hybrid institutions that are neither market nor state controlled. I use some simple games to illustrate her insights.     

Kosovo: The development of interest groups in a fragile democracy

Kosovo offers a unique opportunity to study interest groups in both a transitional political system and a new country. As the youngest of the Balkan countries, both its pluralist democracy and its interest group system are in the early stages of development. The most significant influence on this development was Kosovo's grueling fight for independence from Serbia in the 1990s. This produced a particular form of interest and interest group activity quite different from most political systems in transition to democracy. As in all such systems, however, Kosovo's group system has also been shaped by its political culture, socioeconomic, including religious, factors, and particularly the international community. This article explains the various factors that shaped early interest group activity, its characteristics, and how it has evolved into a more traditional group system but one that remains bifurcated.     

The development of interest groups in the Balkans: Background and contemporary characteristics

Understanding the political development of the Balkans can be challenging even for historians and social scientists. This is particularly the case with the region's past and present interest group systems as virtually no research is available on the subject. With this in mind, this article provides basic background on the region and its fledgling interest group system as a foundation for approaching the analysis in the 7 country articles that follow. The topics considered include an overview of the common elements of the 7 group systems and their differences, developments that shaped these systems, and an initial look at the role of interest groups in consolidating the region's pluralist political systems.     

Marketing good works: new trends in how interest groups recruit supporters

Charities or interest groups need to attract supporters, who offer both financial support and participation, to achieve their overall goal of influencing public affairs. They can use political marketing to help them attract and retain such supporters. Existing literature indicates they use marketing techniques such as direct mail to communicate to potential new supporters, but new research has discovered that the influence of political marketing is much more comprehensive. The most effective groups are now using political marketing to design the package they offer to supporters. They go through a four‐stage process. First, they conduct market intelligence to understand what supporters want from the organisation and second, they design their product accordingly. Third, they communicate this to potential supporters and then finally deliver campaign progress and they communicate this to existing supporters. They use marketing concepts: they adopt a market orientation and build an organisation designed to take account of its users' needs and wants. Although such charities are often associated with non‐business behaviour, the most successful groups are adopting the concepts and techniques of comprehensive political marketing as the means to increase their influence on government and public affairs. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Competition and interaction: Party ties to interest groups in a multidimensional policy space

Political parties and interest groups play a vital role in incorporating societal interests into democratic decision-making. Therefore, explaining the nature and variation in the relationship between them will advance our understanding of democratic governance. Existing research has primarily drawn attention to how exchange of resources shapes these relationships largely neglecting the role of contextual conditions. Our contribution is to examine whether parties’ structured interactions with different categories of interest groups vary systematically with the pattern of party competition at the level of policy dimensions. First, we argue that higher party fragmentation in a policy space makes organisational ties to interest groups more likely, due to fears of voter loss and splinter groups. Second, we expect higher polarisation between parties on a policy dimension to make ties to relevant groups less likely due to increased electoral costs. We find support for both expectations when analysing new data on 116 party units in 13 mature democracies along nine different policy dimensions. Our findings underline the value of considering the strategic context in which parties and interest groups interact to understand their relationship. The study sheds new light on parties and interest groups as intermediaries in democracy and contributes to a new research agenda connecting interest group research with studies of parties’ policy positions and responsiveness.     

党内法规反腐的性质、作用及基本思路

党内法规反腐成为我国制度反腐不可或缺的重要组成部分,这是由中国共产党的执政党地位和核心领导作用所决定的。党内法规的柔性特征是强力反腐的"缓冲阀",党内法规作为第一道防线是防腐必备的"羽绒衣",党内法规的伦理道德属性则有助于从根源上消除腐败,因此党内法规反腐在我国反腐败斗争中发挥着示范引领乃至决定性作用。当前,党内法规反腐还存在着法规制度建设不完善以及制度执行力不足的问题,应当立足于以防范为主的基本立场,坚持"防治结合,以治促防";既要重视党员的党性修养又要正视党员的人性需求,实现监督约束与关怀激励相互促进;要坚持制度建设与制度执行力建设共同推进,以提升党内法规反腐实效。     

‘Cleaning up’ while cleaning up? Pollution abatement,interest groups and contingent trade policies

This paper analyzes the political economy of environmental-policy formation in a trading economy with established rules for administered protection. We argue that the social costs associated with the adoption of an inefficient environmental regime are likely to be compounded by induced restrictions on trade when the effected industries are import competing. The preferences of interest groups for alternative environmental regimes tend to be linked to the legal-institutional setting in which trade policy is conducted. Under existing rules and practices in the area of administered protection, there is reason to believe that interest group preferences for an inefficient approach to pollution control will be strengthened because the adoption of such a regime is more likely to lead to a concomitant increase in trade barriers.