Coalitions for policy influence: Bringing the outsiders in?

Outsider interest groups often struggle to get a foothold in public policy due to their disadvantaged position in the lobbying process. However, coalition action affords an opportunity for groups with fewer resources to gain influence without large costs by enabling them to pool social and political resources and increase their legitimacy and power. Hence, coalition action potentially empowers outsiders to "get inside" the policy process. In this paper, we thus ask if and how coalition action affects the perceived lobbying success of outsider interest groups. More precisely, we examine whether such groups take advantage of the opportunities that this strategy offers, and, if so, does this strategy affect their perceived influence on policy outcomes. We hypothesize that coalition action is a way of securing access to the political processes for outsider groups and that coalition action is positively associated with the perceived influence of such groups. By using novel survey data on 648 Norwegian interest groups, our regression analysis confirm that coalition action is a fruitful strategy for outsiders. For outsider groups, coalition action is positively associated with perceived influence. This finding speaks both to the literature on coalition action and to the literature on political participation.