Lobbying during the COVID-19 pandemic: the influence of interest organizations on legislative amendments in Germany

What influence did interest groups have on legislation during the COVID-19 pandemic? We address this question for the German context by systematically comparing amendments to ministerial draft bills before and throughout the crisis. Researchers highlight the disruptive effect of COVID-19 as a focus event and point out that it enables quasi-experimental research designs. Studies on interest representation during the pandemic demonstrate that it had systematic effects on interest groups. Comparative survey and focus-group based research (Crepaz et al. 2022) suggests that access to parliament, government, and bureaucrats tended to decrease in general, but that interest groups did not necessarily perceive a decline in their impact on rule-making, especially if they were resourceful. A German study on business group lobbying during COVID-19 (Fuchs & Sack 2022) found that resourceful groups were especially involved in consultations on economic policy-measures developed in response to the crisis. Yet other analyses point to the importance of expert advice and evidence based policy-making in the pandemic. In accordance with these analyses, our working hypotheses are that (1) business interest groups have not lost in influence during the crisis, (2) experts and research institutes have gained in say, and that correspondingly (3) public and identity groups have lost clout. We seek to add to the set of quasi-experimental interest group studies in the following ways: First, we compare the impact of interest group lobbying in times of regular day-to-day politics in 2019 to its impact during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when a considerable number of health-oriented policy measures and large economic compensation packages were adopted. Secondly, to single out the effects of COVID-19 as a change of the lobbying context and as a policy problem, our study systematically categorizes legislative issues, depending on how they relate to COVID-19. We distinguish between the following categories of legislative acts: (1) pre-COVID-19 acts, (2) acts initiated during the pandemic but not addressing it, and (3) acts addressing COVID-19 and its consequences, which we will differentiate, to the extent possible, into health and wealth-oriented legislation. Thirdly, we draw on original, comprehensive, and detailed observational data that is mostly based on newly available public records on German federal legislation. We provide insights into the passage of more than 100 bills that the government submitted to the parliament in 2019 and 2020. We record more than 3,000 actor appearances in formal departmental consultations and in informal meetings with senior and junior ministers on these bills. Specifically, we analyze the relevance of this informational lobbying for pre-parliamentary amendments of bills, controlling for the policy area, distances among government parties’ policy positions, the public salience of a bill, its relevance to federal institutions, and its inclusion in a coalition treaty.