Citizen Agendas and Lobbying Agendas: A Cross-National Comparison of Policy Priorities

Organized interest groups are often treated as conduits between public opinion and government policy making. Legislators, in particular, rely on the information lobby groups provide about what constituents prefer. In this paper we evaluate the degree to which interest groups’ agenda priorities are or are not congruent with the public’s preferences about what governments should focus on. To this end, we have interviewed a stratified random sample of hundreds of lobby groups and surveyed random samples 1000 individuals in each of four countries: the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, and the Netherlands). We compare groups’ and the public’s ideal slate of issues to see just how ‘representative’ interest groups are of the public’s issue priorities. In this time of unexpected electoral outcomes, we find greater agreement than one might expect regarding which issue areas are most important. But as respondents’ issue priorities increase in specificity, the congruence between interest groups’ agendas and the public’s agenda rapidly diverges.