Beyond the Usual Suspects: Interest Groups in the Global South

Abstract

Existing knowledge and ongoing research on interest groups is highly developed when it comes to North American and West European democracies. The largest concentration of studies analyses advocacy in the United States (e.g., Nownes 2015 or Walker and McCarthy 2010), in Western European countries (e.g., Van Waarden 1992, in the Netherlands; Naurin and Boräng 2012, in Sweden; or Klüver 2015, in Germany) or lobbying vis-à-vis the EU (e.g., Berkhout 2015 or Berkhout and Lowery 2010). More recently, scholars have begun to explore Central and Eastern European countries (see Rozbicka et al 2020 and Dobbins and Riedel 2021) as well as some settings further afield, like Australia (Fraussen and Halpin 2016). The vast accomplishments of that literature demonstrate that understanding interest group systems remains crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies (Putnam 2000 or Beyers et al. 2008). Interest organizations are perceived as partners in the policy process, enhancing its open, transparent and participatory character. In fact, the emergence and sustainability of interest groups is often treated as one of the prerequisites of successful democratization. Yet in spite of the importance of interest groups for the democratisation process, studies of interest groups’ activities in the Global South are still a rarity. While Western democracies link the emergence of modern civil society and democratization with a century-long process, different patterns emerge when examining interest group activity in the Global South. These include rapid, unexpected regime changes which create opportunities for interest communities to emerge (as in Rozbicka et al. 2020) and neoliberal market reforms which shift the balance of domestic economic power to create a new lobbying structure (see Mancuso 2016 or Hopewell 2014). Comparing interest representation in underexplored countries with similar processes in Western counterparts elucidates how neglecting interest representation in much of the world has hindered our understanding of advocacy in general. One of the key findings to date is that the term ‘interest group’ is rarely used when referring to advocacy activities in the Global South. This highlights the need to reconsider how we define interest groups and advocacy and, particularly, whether it is possible to do so in a more universally applicable way. Further, statistical models deployed most frequently to analyse interest groups’ activities in the Global North are not applicable in many other countries due to a lack of monitoring of interest groups’ activities and to the absence of central registries. This raises questions about how our methodologies of researching interest groups’ activities can be adapted to enable a more encompassing, globally relevant research agenda vis-à-vis advocacy. By bringing together the work of scholars working on countries ‘beyond the usual suspects’, this panel will highlight the state of the art in profiled countries, showcase the field of inquiry on interest groups’ activity, demonstrate and promote methodological innovation in interest group research, and help build a foundation for a study of interest groups which reflects the diversity of advocacy in today’s world.

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