‘How much we study? How little we know?’ - Introductory essay on studying interest groups beyond Western Democracies

Public-private dialogue and lobbying are crucial elements of policymaking in the countries of the Global South and the development of these dialogues has been additionally encouraged by international organizations like the World Bank, the WHO, and the UN. Yet in spite of the importance of interest groups and their activities for democracy and democratisation process, studies of interest groups’ activities are still a rarity when it comes to the Global South. Thus, we call for an examination of the characteristics of interest representation in underexplored countries in comparison to similar processes in their Western counterparts. We argue that it will explicate how neglecting interest representation in much of the world hinders our understanding of advocacy in general. This paper is based on the event organized within the framework of ECPR Standing Group on Interest Groups that took place on 5th November 2020 and was titled: ‘Beyond the Usual Suspects: Interest Groups in India, Zimbabwe and Brazil’. The event brought together the work of excellent scholars and further underlined a need for comparison between traditional knowledge and insights from other countries. One of the key findings of the event, which will further be explored in the paper, is that the term ‘interest group’ is rarely used when referring to the advocacy activities in the Global South. This highlights the need to reconsider how we define interest groups and advocacy and, particularly, whether it is possible to do so in a more universally applicable way. We also argue that statistical models deployed most frequently to analyze interest groups’ activities in the Global North are not applicable in most of the countries discussed during the event and in the Global South more broadly, both due to a lack of, or at best intermittent, monitoring of interest groups’ activities and the absence of central registries. This raises questions about how our methodologies of researching interest groups’ activities must be adapted to enable a more encompassing, globally relevant research agenda vis-à-vis interest group advocacy.