Why Do Organized Interests Resort to Legal Strategies, and How? Evidence from a Survey Among Organizations in Germany

Legal mobilization and litigation have long been acknowledged as a distinct form of interest group politics. However, the exact purpose and status of legal strategies have remained somewhat indeterminate. While some authors associated legal strategies with direct or inside lobbying (Berry 1977: 213 f.; Kollman 1998: 35), an alternative conceptualization regards litigation as an outsider strategy akin to organizing protest, social media campaigns or mobilizing the general public (Weible and Heikkila 2017: 31). The proposed paper seeks to shed light on how the use of legal strategies as an avenue of interest group politics varies across types of organizations. It does so by making use of novel data collected from a survey among approx. 2,000 organizations registered in Germany, which is fielded as part of a project on legal mobilization by organized interests in the European judicial network (ReMobilEVV). The sampling frame combines data from three sources: The EU Transparency Register, the Lobby Register of the German Bundestag, and lists of access passes to the Bundestag issued to representatives of organized interests in the years 2015 – 2020. The survey innovates in two respects: First, it is designed specifically to inquire organizations about their motivations and aims of resorting to legal remedies, and the organizational preconditions and decision-making processes associated with mobilizing the law. Theoretically, objective(s) and form of legal mobilization are assumed to be shaped by the organizational format, which is operationalized as the relative importance of a logic of influence over a logic of membership and the organizations' resource endowment (financial resources, staff, access to legal expertise). Second, the survey extends to firms as a type of organized interest that is relatively understudied, but well-equipped when it comes to litigation-based strategies of interest mediation. With this survey-based approach, the paper seeks to bridge the gap between more quantitatively oriented interest group research and the traditional, case-study based approach of the legal mobilization literature and yield novel, generalizable findings relevant for both research strands alike.