Are active lobbyists more satisfied with policy outcomes than free riders? Unpacking the collective action problem for interest group influence

One of the most dominant axioma’s in political science is the collective action problem. This refers to a situation when those who benefit from public resources do not pay for them. In lobbying research this refers to a situation where some organizations spend actual resources on lobbying, while other organizations may still profit from these efforts without doing any work. While a dominant theory, there are no actual empirical studies confirming or rejecting this mechanism. That is, studies do not disentangle whether organizations which lobby (more) than others are more satisfied with the outcome of the lobby efforts compare to organizations which do less or nothing at all. In other words, we do not know to what extent organizations can free ride on the success of other organizations. In this paper we set out to analyze exactly this: is there are a difference between organizations which indicate to have lobbied and influenced policymakers and organizations which indicate to have not been influential at all or have not even bothered to lobby? We answer this question based on a unique survey among interest group leaders regarding Covid policies across 9 countries in Europe. The survey asks about the strategies, influence, and satisfaction with specific Covid policies across the countries in two waves: one directly after the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and one a year later in 2021. Our data collection strategy is uniquely structured to answer this question because – first – we approached organization based on a bottom-up sample of interest organizations. This means we have both active lobbyist and free riders in our sample. Second, we asked organizations about both the influence they had on lobby outcomes as well as their satisfaction with policy outcomes. Combined this allows us to test whether organizations are more satisfied with lobby outcomes if they were actively engaged in lobbying and/or were successful in doing so. Our results are important for theory development in the field of collective action problems as well as for more specified studies focusing on the sources of influence of interest organizations.