Lobbying as a Leveraged Act: On Resource Dependencies and Lobby Presence

It is hard to imagine any advanced western democracy functioning without the involvement of interest groups. One of the most fundamental concerns of political scientists regarding this long-standing practice is the imbalance in the number and type of interest groups involved in public decision making. Business associations tend to vastly outnumber any other type of interest groups, in particular those representing public interests. This ‘mobilization bias’ has been a remarkably persistent phenomenon across time, government venues and entire political systems (Lowery et al. 2005; Messer et al. 2010; Olson 1965; Schattschneider 1970[1960]). And in our contemporary multi-level governance systems these long-existing mobilization biases seem only to be reinforced (Beyers and Kerremans 2007; Hanegraaff et al. 2011; Kohler-Koch and Quittkat 2013). Indeed, recent studies mostly demonstrate that business groups are more often present at key political institutions at national and supranational governance levels and employ a broader set of lobby tactics than citizen groups do (Beyers and Kerremans 2007; Dur and Matteo 2013; Eising 2007; Hanegraaff et al. 2011; Kohler-Koch and Quittkat 2013; Rasmussen and Carroll 2013). By now this skewed distribution has almost become a truism and variables representing the distinction between businesses and citizen groups in statistical analyses are often considered control variables rather than main effects.