Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz

Interest Group Strategies: Navigating between Privileged Access and Strategies of Pressure

The literature often contrasts interest groups possessing insider status and outsider groups forced to seek influence through more indirect means. Drawing on data from a survey of all national Danish interest groups, this article demonstrates that most groups have an action repertoire including both direct contacts to bureaucrats and parliamentarians and indirect activities such as media campaigns and mobilizations of members. Different strategies of influence are correlated positively, hence, there is no contradiction between pursuing strategies associated with insider access to decision-making and strategies where pressure is put on decision makers through media contacts and mobilizations. An analysis of four distinct strategies – an administrative, a parliamentary, a media and a mobilization strategy – finds interesting variations in the factors that affect the pursuance of the various strategies of influence. Groups with a privileged position vis-à-vis decision makers have high levels of activities targeting these decision makers, but the lack of a privileged position does not lead groups to pursue indirect strategies. Indirect strategies are most intensively pursued by cause groups and groups who find themselves in a competitive situation with regard to attracting members.

Governing Danish Agencies by Contract: From Negotiated Freedom to the Shadow of Hierarchy

In the early 1990s the Danish Ministry of Finance initiated an experiment where a few ministerial departments negotiated performance agreements with their agencies. Since then internal contracting has spread and is now nearly universally used in central government. However, a close study demonstrates that in this process contract content has changed dramatically. The early contracts were quid-pro-quo agreements. Agencies committed themselves to improve efficiency but contracts at the same time admitted them increased managerial discretion. The mature contracts are quite different. Departmental ministries have exploited their considerable autonomy to set demands that are related to policy and service levels rather than internal management. Here ministries have adapted to the characteristics of their policy tasks and to the presumed concerns of the target groups dominating their political environment. Building on an analysis of all contracts in force in 1995, 2000, and 2005 the paper sees this change as a transformation of an ideal type NPM-instrument into a managerial tool adapted to a system where highly autonomous ministers act as unquestioned political executives.

Policy or Processes in Focus

The news media are frequently accused of portraying politics as a strategic game rather than focusing on political issues. However, the understanding of the prevalence of different news frames in the media coverage of politics is limited in several respects. This article seeks to contribute to remedying this by (1) conducting a longitudinal analysis of the use of different news frames during election periods as well as in everyday politics, (2) adopting an analytical framework including several different types of process focus, and (3) pointing to the importance of including political developments alongside changes in the media system when explaining developments in the news coverage of politics. The empirical analysis of twenty years of public radio news in Denmark confirms a long-term trend toward greater focus on electoral consequences in news stories in election periods; however, the trend is not mirrored in news stories when an election is not imminent. In explaining these findings, situational factors related to the political system and party politics must be included alongside explanations pointing toward an increasing professionalization of political parties as well as long-term changes in the media system and in party competition.

From classic to modern corporatism. Interest group representation in Danish public committees in 1975 and 2010

ABSTRACT Involving interest groups in public committees is a crucial feature of policy-making in many democratic systems. This article investigates how the composition of committees in Denmark has developed from 1975 to 2010, with specific focus on interest group seats. We argue that the committee system has been adapted in response to societal changes. We expect relatively better representation of citizen groups over time and a decline in the level of concentration in access. These expectations are tested in an analysis of the composition of all public committees in the two years. We find remarkable stability in the 35-year period, but also an adaptation of the committee system largely in the expected direction. This traditional corporatist institution appears less weakened than often assumed.

Performance Contracts and Goal Attainment in Government Agencies

ABSTRACT Public sector reforms introducing performance contracts provide a unique opportunity to investigate goals set for government agencies and factors affecting goal attainment. The article maps the set of goals contained in performance contracts for Danish government agencies in 2000, 2005, and 2008. Performance contracts are found to reflect the complex character of agency goals with performance goals ranging from project initiation to reducing case work time or increasing productivity. The article also analyzes factors affecting goal attainment. Agencies with a large percentage of goals focused on project initiation and production exhibit higher levels of goal attainment. Also, goal attainment improves as agencies and ministries gain experience with performance contracts. For practitioners, it is relevant that contracts target a wide variety of goals and over time focus increasingly on results. Contracts serve to focus agency attention as three quarters of all demands are met. A crucial factor seems to be whether agencies are in control of formulating and meeting goals. Efforts to improve the contract regime may thus concentrate on enabling government departments to secure ambitious and relevant performance goals.

Comparing the domestic and the EU lobbying context: perceived agenda-setting influence in the multi-level system of the European Union

ABSTRACT The contribution analyses whether the factors affecting perceived interest group influence on political agendas differ depending on whether groups lobby in their own domestic context or seek influence at the European Union (EU) level. Findings from a multinomial logistic regression analysis based on survey responses from 1,723 domestic interest groups in the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands do not indicate that differences in the national setting are important for perceived group influence at the two levels. However, they underline how the decision-making level acts as a contextual factor, which conditions the explanatory potential of other crucial variables: Embeddedness into domestic decision-making is primarily an asset for securing perceived influence on the national rather than the EU agenda, whereas group resources matter more at the EU than the national level. In this way our multi-level design underlines how the state-of-play for securing perceived influence varies across lobbying contexts.

The Rise of Citizen Groups? The Mobilization and Representation of Danish Interest Groups, 1975–2010

Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system and the representation of interest groups in political arenas. While replicating findings of increasing citizen mobilization from other countries is expected, it is argued here that the development of groups’ political representation as a consequence of this mobilization depends on the dynamics of resource exchange in different political arenas. This argument is tested on a unique dataset of Danish interest groups in 1975 and 2010 which includes data on group populations and group access to the administration and the media. The analysis demonstrates that citizen groups must overcome not only the challenge of organizing, but also persistent logics guiding the inclusion of, interest groups in different political arenas. Citizen groups have been more successful in increasing their representation in the media than in the administrative arena.