Frontstage and Backstage of Internal Interest Group Democracy

Interest groups have the potential to positively contribute to legitimacy and quality of decision-making. Whether they live up to this potential is one of the key puzzles in research focusing on interest groups’ role in policy making, with key focus being on different sources of bias in interest intermediation. One of the strands in this research points to more internal sources of bias and studies how the way groups are internally organised impacts their effectiveness in aggregating and faithfully representing preferences of their members (Albareda, 2018; Berkhout et al., 2023; Binderkrantz, 2009; Bolleyer & Correa, 2022; Halpin, 2010; Heylen et al., 2020; Kröger, 2019; Lowery & Marchetti, 2012). Most studies in this strand focus on the formal aspects of interest group internal dynamics and the extent to which the logic of membership is balanced with the logic of influence (Schmitter & Streeck, 1999). In our study, we go beyond these formal aspects, through an intensive case study of an interest organization operating in the Norwegian education policy domain. For our conceptual approach, we take as our point of departure that key elements of internal interest group democracy are the extent to which members (1) participate in interest group decision-making and (2) are able to influence the outcomes of said decision-making (Albareda, 2018; Bolleyer, 2024). To this theoretical baseline we add three additional dimensions. The first one concerns the distinction between formal structures and actual practice. In addition to analysing how member participation and influence are formalised in various internal documents, we also look into how different actors within the interest group perceive, interpret and engage with these formalized elements. The second dimension concerns the distinction between member participation and influence that unfolds in the physical world, and various virtual / digital tools used by members, elected leaders and employed staff in their work within the interest organisation. The third dimension concerns the extent to which activities, member participation and influence are visible, envisaging a continuum ranging from frontstage (visible to everyone, including non-members) to backstage (visible to only a handful of members, elected leaders or staff). Our study relies on rich empirical material, comprising analysis of various organisational documents (35 in total), group interviews with elected and employed officials (11 respondents), individual and group interviews with member organisations (16 respondents), as well as observations of various meetings of the organisation’s decision-making structures (3 in total, 2 of which are the meetings of the general assembly, the highest decision-making structure).