Teaming up with strangers? A survey experiment on the choice of coalition partners in policy agenda setting

The literature on lobbying coalitions has explored the choice to cooperate in coalitions in a series of correlational studies. Yet, considerable diversity in cooperation activities, as well as path dependencies between organisations complicate these analyses. For this reason, we still know too little about different types of asymmetries between coalition partners that hinder organizational cooperation. Survey experiments can add to these findings by exploring differences between the strategic choices by different types of organisations in more controlled, though hypothetical, settings. In this paper, we present the results of a pre-registered survey experiment, conducted in eight European polities (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, and the European Union) to understand the willingness of organisations to cooperate with ‘strangers’, as well as members of their network in the agenda setting phase of policymaking. Our results help understand the importance of previous connections, homophily and reputational considerations in coalition formation, and uncover differences in the willingness to engage in different types of cooperation.