Lobbying for the People? Measuring substantive representation by interest groups

The interest group literature has long struggled with the question of how to operationalize and measure the normative idea of a non-biased interest group system. While most previous attempts have focused on the descriptive representation of different types of groups, or the distribution of resources between groups, we suggest that substantive representation is a more promising conception. We measure substantive representation by looking at the policy issues that lobbyists raise, how much time and effort they put into these issues, and in which direction on relevant policy scales they are lobbying. We subsequently compare the aggregated lobbying efforts with public opinion data, to estimate to what extent the lobbyists’ priorities coincide with public opinion. Our case is the Swedish interest group population, where we would expect relatively low bias. The data analyses are based both on incoming mail from more than 1500 organizations to the Swedish government, and on a survey of 630 organizations. We find that lobbying is prioritized in the policy areas that are considered the most important among the public, but also that some areas are “over-lobbied” compared to a strict representational ideal. While lobbying on the left-right dimension is balanced compared to public opinion, there is a considerable gap in questions concerning immigration.