Interest groups as ventriloquists or how they affect parliamentarians’ speeches during policy debates

The relationship between decision-makers and interest groups is commonly theorized as a mutually beneficial exchange relationship: interest groups furnish policy expertise or political intelligence to policymakers who then intervene on behalf of interest groups. Whereas the effect of interest groups’ resources on their access to relevant policymakers has been extensively studied, relatively little effort has been spent on exploring the downstream effects of contacts between interest groups and policymakers. What happens once interest groups have gained access to the policymakers? If access indeed represents a crucial intermediary step to the exercise of influence, then it should affect policymakers’ behavior. To test this claim, we focus on the interventions of Members of Parliament (MPs) during policy debates in the Swiss Parliament. We have identified the MPs with relevant connections to different types of interest groups (business interest associations, trade unions, citizen groups) for a set of 100 policy issues debated in the Swiss Parliament between 2008 and 2020. We test if MPs with connections to interest groups are more likely to intervene during the parliamentary debates on these issues than MPs without connections. We also test whether MPs with connections to certain types of interest groups (e.g. business interest associations) are particularly likely to intervene during the debates. We thus seek to subject the theory of resource exchange to a more stringent test. As we study the consequences of interest groups’ access to MPs, our results have important implications for interest groups’ role as representational vehicles.