Populations, Access and Bias in Multilevel Lobbying

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Patrick Bernhagen; Dr. Florian Spohr
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455518560

The renewal project „Populations, Access and Bias in Multilevel Lobbying” (PABIM) aims to assess interest group bias at the stages of mobilization and access on the subnational, national, and European levels. Thereby, it seeks to widen the research of the project “Lobbying Across Multiple Levels: German Federal Institutions, European Union, and the Länder” (“Lobbying im Mehrebenensystem: Bund, Länder und die Europäische Union – LiM”), which has analyzed access and strategies of organized interest in the German multilevel system on a sample of 25 federal legislative proposals that were introduced in the year 2019. Building on this work, the renewal project will extend our research to interest group population studies in order to assess the size and direction of bias, both in the composition of the interest group systems at each level and in the representation of societal interests in political institutions. Linking the top-down sampling of lobbyists from the first funding period with bottom-up mapping of interest group populations allows inferences about bias and strengthens the external validity of the findings from the first funding period. To do this, the project proceeds in two steps. The first step will be a comparison of interest group populations in the Bundesland Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and the EU. To compile a comparative dataset across these three levels of government we will complement a directory-based mapping of interest group populations (e.g., OECKL) with the collection of lobby registration data on the three levels. The resulting population data will not only allow us to assess to what extent – and to whose advantage – the interest group systems on the three levels are biased, but also pave the ground to investigate bias in the access of organized interests across a range of venues. In a second step, we will measure access to policy venues using a short online questionnaire asking the lobbyists we identify about their contacts to political venues at the three levels. We will not only include interest associations but also other organized interests including business corporations in the analysis. Moreover, we will pay particular attention on umbrella organizations to gain insights in how interest groups organize and divide labour across levels. The comparison across different venues and levels of government adds new insights to the study of interest groups by providing unique data based on similar sampling strategies and a unified coding scheme across the three levels. By assessing bias in populations and access on the regional, national and EU level, the renewal project will yield important insight into the (in)equality of political representation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants