No Umbrella, No Voice? On the Role of Permanent Coalition Structures in Securing Access to Hearings

Lobbying is a collective enterprise (Klüver 2913:59) and coalition lobbying has been described as one of the most frequently employed influence tactics used by interest groups today (Nelson and Yakee 2012: 339). Nevertheless, the interest group literature has only begun to show if and how active cooperation between groups affects their success. This paper assesses a first part of the potential causal chain of how cooperation may be beneficial, namely by relating it to access to exclusive exchange with policy makers in hearings (cf. Burstein et al. 1995:284), where non-state actors are invited to provide oral evidence to the policy process. It asks whether policy makers are more willing to hear organisations that are umbrella organisations and, hence, represent a variety of views and signal broad support. More specifically, it gauges if the number of member organisations, member firms, or individuals represented has an effect on access to hearings for the non-state actors active on an issue. An original dataset on 12 policy issues (6 German and 6 British), on which a total of 15 related hearings were held, is analysed to relate different measures of the type and scope of umbrella organisation to the dependent variable of access to a hearing. The total sample of roughly 600 advocates active on the issues derives from media coding, interviews with decision makers and desk research. Results of the analysis will shed light on the mechanisms of how cooperation in permanent umbrella structures benefits advocates and show whether the number of organisations or number of (claimed) represented individuals is a relevant currency for having a say on policy processes.