Do Citizens Feel Represented by Interest Organisations? An Explorative Study on Citizens’ Views of Interest Representation

Increasingly, individual and collective actors are playing a crucial role in addressing the representation deficit within western liberal democracies. Interest organisations (IGs), such as NGOs, are among these civil society actors that engage in so-called ‘self-appointed representation’ (Montanaro, 2012). Through the mobilisation, aggregation and articulation of different interests within society, IGs are well-suited to represent the interests of varying constituencies (Rasmussen et al., 2014). To that end, IGs constitute an important complement to representative democracy (Boräng et al., 2024; Richardson, 1995). Consequently, many studies have assessed the representative quality of IGs’ internal organisation, such as the descriptive profile of lobbyists and their constituencies (Junk et al., 2021; Reher & Evans, 2024). Additionally, few studies have focused on citizens’ attitudes towards IGs’ involvement in politics and lobbying (Aizenberg et al., 2023; Rasmussen & Reher, 2024). To date, however, scant research has examined citizens’ feelings of being represented by IGs and adopted a multidimensional view of representation. The feelings and needs of citizens in interest representation are important to consider, as IGs rely on citizens’ mobilisation and participation for framing issues, making claims and selecting constituents (Jordan & Maloney, 2007). In turn, (marginalised) citizens often depend on IGs to represent their interests, as IGs provide them ‘group voice’ outside of traditional political claims-making channels (Strolovitch, 2007; Kevins & Robison, 2021). It is therefore essential to consider citizens’ views on IGs as ‘surrogates’ and IGs’ justifications in interest representation (Wolkenstein & Wratil, 2021; Blumenau et al., forthcoming). This paper speaks to this gap by exploring whether citizens feel represented by IGs in terms of surrogation and justification. It builds on literatures of (multidimensional) political representation and interest group politics and focuses on studying marginalised interests. The paper adopts a mixed-methods design, including qualitative interviews and survey experiments, and aims to study contexts beyond western Europe.