Conceptualizing public interest advocacy for long-term policy change: The NGOs’ lob-bying strategy portfolio of expertise, campaigns, membership, and platform types

For a long time, lobbying strategies of business interests and public interests were characterised by the dichotomy of inside and outside strategies. While business interests built on direct contacts with policy making officials (inside lobbying), public interests run campaigns for public attention and mobilization to achieve their policy goals (outside lobbying). Recent research elaborated on a more differentiated choice of strategy types, as we can observe empirically, outside strategies are in fact employed even if privileged access to government and parliament is available. The choice of strategy depends on the type of organization, its resources, and the political context. However, from a public policy perspective, political attention and vocal demands are oftentimes insufficient to translate public interest advocacy in policy successes. As scholars agree that policy making is characterized by frequent stability and incremental change as opposed to infrequent major or substantial change, we need a closer look at the different logics of public interest advocacy. Building on these perspectives from interest group and public policy research, this paper presents a theoretical conceptualisation of public interest advocacy strategies in the triangle of action rationality between the established logics of support, influence, and reputation. The research question asks how different types of NGOs act in their public interest advocacy between support base, politics, and media. Empirically, the paper focuses on German public interest organisations that participated in the joint campaign against TTIP and CETA as a focal point to identify a wide range of organizational types. Using conceptual clusters as an instrument of case selection, the qualitative research design systematically reduces the number of cases from 130 organizations to five particularly significant cases for a deep analysis in various policy fields nested a broad interconnected context. LobbyControl, Attac, Foodwatch, Campact and the German Environmental Foundation were selected based on different strategic characteristics of advocacy, service and project work. The data material includes 31 expert interviews, a wide of range of documents and podcast interviews which are evaluated using qualitative content analysis. The results show a differentiated picture of the various advocacy profiles from a comprehensive strategy portfolio of modern interest mediation. Accordingly, organizations can choose strategies from a support-based subtype similar to the association model of membership groups, an expertise-based subtype, a campaign-oriented subtype, or a platform-based subtype. The proposed theoretical concept of a triangle of action rationality towards base, politics, and media highlights NGO-specific characteristics, particularly in the areas of overarching strategy, issue selection as well as the role of expertise and legitimacy. Taken together, the strategy portfolio points to the added value of an internal differentiation of public interest organizations, which refines the analytical juxtaposition of business interests and public interests. With this theory-guided and empirical exploratory perspective, the paper contributes to an improved understanding of public interest and NGO strategies of advocacy in the context of public policy change.