Don’t “die hard”: The Resilience of Interest Groups after Covid-19

The resilience of interest groups and entire interest group systems is potentially pivotal for managing the multiple crises that have faced modern democracies in recent years. A global pandemic, the outbreak of war in Europe, as well as rising inflation and energy prices and have put severe strain on individual citizens and companies, as well as the organizations that represent their interests. At the same time, policymakers have experienced a (reoccurring) state of emergency, where they are dependent on informational input from such organizations, but might face severe challenges when it comes to continuing consultation practices ‘as usual’. In this paper, we formulate a theory of interest group resilience by pairing the literature on mortality anxiety of interest groups with that of crisis management responses in organisations. Empirically, we draw on a cross-country survey experiment conducted in June 2020 that identifies important drivers of mortality anxiety at the supply side (interest disturbances) and demand-side (access barriers) of interest representation. Two years later, we followed up on this survey with telephone interviews in one country (Denmark), to identify the actual organizational changes that have resulted and relate these to the key variables of interests. Our findings help identify the relationship between short-term threat perceptions and long-term organizational resilience, and thereby gauge which types of threats are likely to have lasting effects on the interest group system.