The Fluidity of Friends and Foes: A Contingency Theory on Interest Group-party Lobbying

Why do (some) interest groups (IGs) lobby (some) parties but not others? The answer to this question used to be simple: interest groups lobby their ideological friends and preferably the most powerful of them. However, this structural ideological explanation hardly helps us understand situations where issue-specific party positions are undetermined or not salient and when the power of parties is in flux. We theoretically introduce and empirically assess the contingent nature of the relationship between lobbyists and political parties that accounts for such issue-specific and politics-specific variation. More to the point, patterns of IG-party interactions vary, first, according to the status of the issue of concern. That is, interest groups will approach a different and broad set of parties when aiming to get an issue on the government agenda, thus not distinguishing between friends and foes. In contrast, when their goal is to influence outcomes at the decision-making stage they lobby a more narrow and select set of parties. Second, as regards the power-position of political parties, the electoral process fundamentally affects the receptiveness and attractiveness for lobbyists of some political parties versus others. General elections and ensuing cabinet formations provide IGs the possibility to get their issue on the government agenda. The installation of a new government, in turn, is likely to mark the beginning of a period of more reactive IG activities – each with distinct patterns of IGs’ lobbying targets. By incorporating these election-related dynamics we provide a parsimonious theoretical framework that enables us to explain the contingent interactions between IGs and parties. Using original data obtained from interviews with almost 100 Dutch IGs [as well as survey data including information on more than 800 organizations] we test our empirical expectations. We asked interest groups which issue they are working on and with which parties they collaborate. This provides us with a dataset of group-issue-party triads. The fragmented nature of the Dutch party system and the lengthy coalition negotiations make it a most likely case to find an effect of these institutional uncertainties on group-party interaction. The paper contributes to the scholarly debate surrounding IG-party interactions by highlighting their dependence on the issue- and electoral- context. Furthermore, it has important implications for our understanding of the role of IGs in the process of government agenda setting.