William A. Maloney

Interest Groups and Public Policy: The Insider/Outsider Model Revisited

This paper examines the place of groups in the consultative process in British policymaking. It stresses the importance of consultation even under the Thatcher government and distinguishes between consultation, bargaining and negotiation. The paper identifies the important divide between the relatively few groups with privileged status and the greater number of groups who find themselves consigned to less influential positions. The discussion revisits the insider/outsider typology often used to differentiate interest group strategies and status in policy development. It suggests that the insider group term is associated with a particular style of policy making, and offers amendments to the existing use of the terms to avoid the difficulties which occur from the conflation of group strategy and group status.

Researching Interest Group Politics in Europe and Elsewhere: Much We Study, Little We Know?

While understanding interest group systems remains crucial to understanding the functioning of advanced democracies, the study of interest groups remains a somewhat niche field within political science. Nevertheless, during the last 15 years, the academic interest in group politics has grown and we reflect on the state of the current literature. The main objective is to take stock, consider the main empirical and theoretical/conceptual achievements, but most importantly, to reflect upon potential fertile future research avenues. In our view interest group studies would be reinvigorated and would benefit from being reintegrated within the broader field of political science, and more particularly, the comparative study of government.

Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions?

This article notes the systemic lack of conceptual clarity in the social sciences and attempts to illustrate the adverse consequences by closer examination of the particular example of the interest group field. It indicates the significant ambiguities implicit in the term. Not all policy-influencing organisations are interest groups as normally understood, but because there is a lack of an appropriate label the term interest group is used by default. The article seeks to distinguish between interest groups and other policy relevant bodies—often corporations or institutions. It finds disadvantages in adopting a functional interpretation of the interest group term (i.e. any organisation trying to influence public policy). While the wider range of organisations are crucial in understanding the making of public policy, it is confusing to assume that this wider population are all interest groups. The article instead advances the complementary notions of pressure participant, policy participant and interest group. This slightly expanded repertoire of terms avoids conflating important distinctions, and, in Sartoris term permits ‘disambiguation’. The core assumption is that the search for comparative data and exploration of normative questions implies some harmonisation in the interest group currency.

How Bumble‐bees Fly: Accounting for Public Interest Participation*

This paper confirms the existence of public interest groups as a theoretical puzzle for an Olson type (economically-driven) rational choice explanation. It systematically reviews different theoretical approaches that challenge this appearance of paradox. The paper also introduces some British survey data. It concludes that rational choice analysis must subsume non-material incentives, but shows that discussions predicated on conceptions of rationality other than that used by Olson do not imply that participation is a problem to be explained. It also points to the importance of group activity in shaping the preferences of potential members and in stimulating membership.

Regulation in an Episodic Policy‐Making Environment: The Water Industry in England and Wales

This article describes and analyses the evolving regulatory game in the post-privatized water industry. It highlights a regulatory environment that is more complex than that which existed under public ownership, and an industry which is subject to heavier regulation in the private sector than it was in the public sector. There has been erosion of the strict public/private divide following privatization. The article highlights an episodic and seemingly incongruous policy-making environment that defies consistent characterization: sometimes private consensus is the main feature and sometimes it is public conflict. It also illustrates that while there are two broad-based constituencies of interest active in the water sector — cost and environmental — the composition of these coalitions mutates depending on the issue being considered. Indeed, there are occasions when core constituency participants ‘defect’ and join the ‘opposing side’.

Conclusion: Embedding Interest Group Research

All the contributors to this volume share a belief that the study of interest groups will be advanced through an interactive process that conjoins empirical research with the systematic constructio...

“Letting George Do It”: Does Olson Explain Low Levels of Participation?

Abstract This article contributes to the discussion of one component of the “crisis” in political participation by looking at (non‐) participation in groups. The starting point is that political science has a heavy gauge tool for accounting for such low inactivity – Olson’s (1965) free rider proposition. The article accepts the influence of Olson, but uses survey data to investigate whether non‐participation is a self‐interested strategy, as he suggests, or whether it reflects broader differences in resources and orientations to political action. While it is often assumed that surveys demonstrating that members join for collective ends “disprove” Olson’s thesis, this article accepts his rebuttal that these surveys of joiners tell us little about those who refuse to join. Olson accepted that (trivial) numbers of members would join (in addition to those seeking selective benefits), but argued that the number joining for collective goods would be dwarfed by those failing to participate. These he assumed to be free‐riding. This article revisits the definition, and supplies theoretically illuminating survey material from non‐members as well as members. The data show little support for the free‐riding instinct. While Olson implies that free‐riding is logical for almost all potential members, this article suggests that non‐participation is not simply a “leftover” from those not mobilized, but is itself based on specific factors.

Introduction : From bottom-up and top-down towards multi-level governance in Europe

As every small-town politician knows, strengthening democratic decisionmaking processes is not an easy matter – most citizens are hard to motivate to engage in public policy debates. And as every small-town politician or local political entrepreneur knows, most citizens are also unwilling to engage actively in the formal or institutionalised political life of their communities. On both counts citizens can find better things to do with their time. Simultaneously however, there are a wide variety of groups and associations actively seeking to advance their specific interests. When we look to more complex political systems like major cities, regions, states and national states we find these polities are ‘plagued’ by the virtually unsolvable problems and dilemmas that come with any serious attempt to base political decisions on the active engagement of citizens and citizens’ organisations. Finally, if we travel one further political level to the multi-layer system of the European Union (EU) – the central focus of this volume – then finding a solution looks like a ‘lost cause’ before we have even truly begun our search. Put simply and logically, the more numerous the governmental tiers, the further decision-making processes are from citizens, the weaker their potential influence and the smaller the ‘incentives’ to participate.1 Given the above, how does the EU seek to involve citizens more fully and to increase identification with its political institutions? How does the EU seek to improve the transparency, legitimacy and accountability of decision-making procedures? These questions have become central in the enlarged EU. With the continuing expansion of the Union, a complex system of national, sub-national, international, trans-national and supranational institutions has emerged with multiple recursive linkages. In other words, political decision making within Europe is increasingly characterised by the further development of Europeanisation (see Graziano and Vink, 2007). Two approaches (‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’) can be used to analyse the increasingly complex and interdependent relationships in this

Organizational Populations: Professionalization, Maintenance and Democratic Delivery

Interest groups do not have complete directorial control of their own destiny — even mature and savvy professionalized organized interests face significant challenges. Intra- and inter-group circumstances and other contextual factors (e.g. political opportunity structures, political agenda and patronage opportunities) account for the shape of organizational universes.1 However, as Halpin and Jordan (2009: 247) argue, ‘the manipulative “fngers” of interest-group leaders and managers surely shape the observed population levels’. Group leaders and entrepreneurs can effect survival and maintenance chances (and the organizational universes their groups inhabit) by altering the mix of incentives on offer to supporters and policy-makers, and the decisions they take on: the organizational policy-making focus (e.g. a broad policy area, a limited range of issues or a single issue); issue priorities; strategies and tactics; and organizational structure (e.g. hierarchical or non-hierarchical, to be a member, supporter or memberless2 group, or the degree and depth of democratic institutionalization). Gray and Lowery (1996), Lowery and Gray (2004a: 18–19), Bosso (2005: 150), Young (2010: 159) and Duffy (2012: 4) have all shown how increasing governmental action (via legislation, programmes and agencies) and spending has stimulated the creation of new organizations (Duffy, 2012: 4; Gray and Lowery, 1996).

Making Interests: Creating Members?

Over the past few decades conflicting theories have emerged in the social sciences with regard to the bases of public opinion. This chapter discusses the phenomenon of the creation of opinions through examining the case of the environment, but the issue is broad. It questions the commonplace Truman (1951)1 assumption that group membership relates to some spontaneous expression of opinion, or defence or promotion of some interest. This was of course the assumption that Olson (1965) and others (e.g. Hardin, 1995, 2003) set out to undermine with the free-rider observation.