The balancing act of establishing a policy agenda: Conceptualizing and measuring drivers of issue prioritization within interest groups

Interest groups are important intermediaries in Western democracies, with the potential to offer political linkage and form a bridge between the concerns of citizens and the agendas of political elites. While we know an increasing amount about the issue‐based activity of groups, we only have a limited understanding about how they selected these issues to work on. In this article, we examine the process of agenda setting within groups. In particular, we address challenges of conceptualization and measurement. Through a thorough review of the group literature, we identify five main factors that are hypothesized to drive issue prioritization. We operationalize items to tap these factors and then empirically assess this theoretical model relying on data from a survey of national interest groups in Australia. Our findings, from a confirmatory factor analysis, provide support for the multidimensional nature of agenda setting. We discuss how this provides a firm conceptual and methodological foundation for future work examining how groups establish their policy agenda.     

Conceptualizing consultation approaches: identifying combinations of consultation tools and analyzing their implications for stakeholder diversity

Policy Sciences - Contemporary governance is increasingly characterized by the consultation of different types of stakeholders, such as interest groups representing economic and citizen interests,...     

Think tanks and strategic policy-making: the contribution of think tanks to policy advisory systems

Think tanks have proliferated in most Western democracies over the past three decades and are often considered to be increasingly important actors in public policy. Still, their precise contribution to public policy remains contested. This paper takes the existing literature in a new direction by focusing on the capacity of think tanks to contribute to strategic policy-making and assessing their particular role within policy advisory systems. We propose that strategic policy-making capacity requires three critical features: high levels of research capacity, substantial organizational autonomy and a long-term policy horizon. Subsequently, we assess the potential of think tanks to play this particular role in policy-making, using empirical evidence from structured interviews with a set of prominent Australian think tanks.     

Assessing the Composition and Diversity of the Australian Interest Group System

Any democratic society requires mechanisms for citizens to have effective political voice. Clearly, political parties provide a key channel for expressing views and preferences. However, organised interests provide another important mechanism for such representation. A crucial question in this regard is whether the interest group system is capable of ensuring the representation of a variety of public and private interests. Resolving these debates requires data that map the terrain and also are attentive to organisational diversity. This article takes up this challenge through exploring the composition and diversity of the Australian system of organised interests, using a new data set based on the Directory of Australian Associations. This system‐level approach delivers important insights into the nature of the Australian interest group system, as well as provides a framework for subsequent work interpreting and contextualising advocacy activities of particular groups, or lobbying dynamics in specific policy domains.     

How do interest groups legitimate their policy advocacy? Reconsidering linkage and internal democracy in times of digital disruption

The ongoing embrace of interest groups as agents capable of addressing democratic deficits in governing institutions is in large part because they are assumed to contribute democratic legitimacy to policy processes. Nonetheless, they face the challenge of legitimating their policy advocacy in democratic terms, clarifying what makes them legitimate partners in governance. In this article we suggest that digital innovations have disrupted the established mechanisms of legitimation. While the impact of this disruption is most easily demonstrated in the rise of a small number of ‘digital natives’, we argue that the most substantive impact has been on more conventional groups, which typically follow legitimation logics of either representation or solidarity. While several legacy groups are experimenting with new legitimation approaches, the opportunities provided by technology seem to offer more organizational benefits to groups employing the logic of solidarity, and appear less compatible with the more traditional logic of representation.