Leading the Dance but Following Too: Interest Group Responsiveness to Political Parties

Do interest groups adjust their agendas in response to party political conflict and issue attention? Recent research indicates that political parties modify their agendas in order to respond to interest group mobilization. This potentially undermines the representative role played by parties and reinforces interest group biases through the party system. Interest group politics become a threat to representative democracy, according to this perspective. However, it is unlikely that interest groups themselves are not similarly responsive to political parties. If interest groups adjust their agendas in reaction to party political developments their threatening role to representative democracy might be less severe. In this paper we therefore investigate how issue attention by interest groups is affected by party political developments. We expect that interest group attention to an issue increases when this issue also became more important in party politics in the past, but that this effect may be moderated by group-related factors. We test these assertions based on a database of more than 300 issues obtained by the Dutch component of the Agendas and Interest Groups project.