Public Opinion on Interest Group Involvement in Policy-Making: The Role of Emotional, Behavioral and Attitudinal Ties

Interest groups are considered to have the potential to strengthen both the input and output legitimacy of political systems. Yet, they have largely been excluded from the literature on the perceived legitimacy of policy-making. Our study uses original online survey experiments with 9,000 respondents in Germany, the UK and the US to explore citizen judgements of interest group involvement in legislative hearings on policy issues. We focus on procedures through which parliaments can invite external stakeholder to provide oral evidence, and the extent to which different group types are represented (un)equally in these. We argue that how legitimate citizens perceive procedures involving different types of interest groups depends on the links they hold to the respective group types. Given that citizens are boundedly rational, subject to both cognitive and informational constraints, we predict that they use different types of ties to interest groups as a shortcut for judging the severity of neglecting certain stakeholders in consultations. Affective ties are measured by the relative trust citizens have in the interest group types. Behavioral ties refer to citizen involvement in the groups, such as membership financial support. Finally, attitudinal ties refer to shared political ideology between citizens and interest groups. To test these effects, we presented survey respondents with descriptions of fictional policy-making scenarios with randomly varying interest group involvement and preference attainment. Our preliminary findings indicate that several types of ties can affect citizens’ judgement: while citizens generally prefer equal consultation of different group types, they tend to judge decisions and processes as more legitimate when the group they trust more or are engaged with dominates.