This paper discusses the most appropriate methods for the study of networking between political parties and interest organizations. This contribution is an essential part of the doctoral preparatory work being completed by the participant. At this point of the study -i.e. after having reviewed several different approaches and reseult outcomes-, a choice will be made to investigate the party-IG relationships in Flanders, Belgium. One of the most important choices to be made is the one between depth and width. Both the selection between ideological groups or political parties (read: parliamentary parties) as well as the level of analysis (we propose the party elite) is substantiated in such a way that it strengthens rather than weakens the total design of the research and that it fits the contextual and strategic logic of IG behaviour and change.
This research is placed in the broader literature on the advocacy of interests and the political translation of individual and group requirements. When looking at the role party elites play in starting, maintaining or ending relations with IGs we, however, still largely fumble in a dark. Our knowledge and research expertise of the phenomenon of party-IG-networking remains very patchy: either it is focussed on the activities of single IG with a very specifiec interest, or is it about a (small) selection of political and non- political organizations in one specific policy area, or studies zoom in to the roles played by a specific actor (a IG or a political party) and look at the networking strategies allowing the actor to assume its role, the impact, the development etc. of the interaction between party/-ies and IG(s). We proposed a two-sided more integrated appraoch which allows the detection of interactions between party and IG.
