Money, money, money… in a sick man’s world: Changes in interest group funding during the global pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to historically high levels of government spending to avert the negative effects of the virus and policy interventions employed to limit its spread. Some of these resources were channeled through interest organizations including funds to provide services to members, income to secure organizational survival and compensation for lost revenues. These resource flows have the potential to tell us something more general about the logics of resource competition between organizations. While political economists would expect competitive rent-seeking by organizations and the use of lobbying to extract larger rents, pluralist theories in political science might lead us to expect that group mobilization and government responsiveness ultimately reflect the levels of disturbances to constituents’ interests. Based on data from two survey waves in eight European polities (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, and the European Union), we test these expectations and try to gauge whether funding patterns are more consistent with the rent-seeking or disturbance story. The article seeks to bridge strands of the lobbying literature that are often relatively disconnected, and its findings will shed light on the logics of resource allocation when interest organizations - and entire political systems - are under pressure.