Introducing the Party-Interest Group Relationships in Contemporary Democracies Datasets: The Ties That Bind?

The Party-Interest Group Relationships in Contemporary Democracies (PAIRDEM) datasets include data from three different surveys on: 1) central party organizations, 2) legislative party groups, and 3) interest groups (i.e. associations and organizations). The party survey datasets cover all major and minor parties in 19 mature democracies, while the interest group dataset covers representative samples of interest groups in seven such regimes. In addition comes a party dataset based on codings of party statutes and party finance data, generated in collaboration with the Political Party Database (PPDB) for all countries included in the surveys. Taken together, the PAIRDEM datasets contain numerous indicators of various aspects of party-group relationships: both formal and informal organizational ties, be they general or related to specific decision-making processes and policy areas. The dataset also includes indicators of other aspects of relevance: ideological positions, financial and material support, internal structures, origins and capacity, as well as perceptions of influence. In this paper, we present the sampling frames and procedures, response rates, the development of questionnaires and coding processes, and the strategies employed to cope with issues of validity and reliability. To illustrate the potential usage of the datasets we first describe different aspects of party-group relationships in the contemporary democracies, employing mainly disaggregated scores. Second, we investigate how the strength of party-group ties relates to (subsequent) interest group influence on individual parties (and vice versa). In conclusion, we propose simplified organizational tie-measures that can be used in future interest group studies on advocacy trying to take account of enduring party-group relations.