This article analyzes Southern cotton interests and the agricultural politics within the Roosevelt Administration, offering insights into how market conditions can shape reform agendas and the considerable opportunities for capture that accompany ambitious reform agendas that rely on interested experts. It shows that Southern cotton interests within the Administration were divided into interest groups, depending on their market position, that mapped onto a broader national constellation of agricultural interest groups. These groups competed among themselves for capture of a reform agenda that was adjudicated by the responses of the cotton market to different interventions.

Hogg and Bushell’s “The Charter Dialogue between Courts and Legislatures” sparked a debate concerning the extent to which legislatures respond to the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions in which the judges invalidate laws under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. After constructing and coding a dataset of all relevant Charter cases between 2010 and 2023, this paper finds that the legislatures complied with rulings made by the Court in 93.3 per cent (or 28 out of 30) of the cases. It nevertheless demonstrates how the two non-compliant replies (to Bedford on sex work and to Carter on medical assistance in dying) are exceptional in that they featured strong interest-group support for upholding the constitutionality of the challenged provisions and thus straying from the Court’s rulings that invalidated them. This paper argues that while legislatures overwhelmingly comply with Charter rulings, interest-group support may help explain rare instances of legislative noncompliance.

This paper investigates the conditions under which women are more likely to represent interest groups in parliamentary hearings, shifting attention from the content of advocacy to the identity of advocates. While existing research has focused on how interest groups gain access to legislative venues, it has largely overlooked who delivers these messages and how messenger characteristics shape political representation. Drawing on theories of gender representation, interest group advocacy, and source effects, we develop a framework that distinguishes between structural and strategic representation and examine whether gender is deployed as a symbolic and relational resource in legislative settings. Using an original dataset covering all interest group appearances in the Spanish Parliament from 1996 to 2023, and hierarchical logistic regression models with Bayesian inference, we analyze how organizational, institutional, and contextual factors shape gendered representation. The findings show that citizen groups are significantly more likely than economic organizations to be represented by women, and that female representation increases with the proportion of women MPs on parliamentary committees. Gendered patterns also vary across policy domains and hearing characteristics. Importantly, the results provide evidence consistent with strategic adaptation: interest groups appear more likely to select female representatives in gender-diverse institutional environments, suggesting that gender functions as a form of strategic signaling rather than solely reflecting internal organizational structures. These findings contribute to research on interest groups and political representation by highlighting how identity operates as a political resource, with implications that extend beyond parliamentary lobbying to broader debates on descriptive and substantive representation.

How do media systems shape which interests are heard in AI policy debates? We analyze 37,954 articles published between 2018 and 2024 in eight leading newspapers from Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, using a large language model to identify the organizations cited and to classify the tone of their coverage. Three patterns stand out. First, economic actors dominate everywhere, appearing in roughly 85 per cent of articles, but liberal systems give noticeably more space to NGOs, academics and trade unions than polarized-pluralist ones. Second, the cross-national diversity gap does not come from how individual articles are composed; it comes from how often newsrooms publish multi-source stories at all. Third, sourcing profiles diverge across outlets in liberal systems and converge in polarized-pluralist ones, suggesting that market competition matters more than ideological alignment for editorial differentiation. Trade unions, notably, slip into negative territory in Spain.

Interest groups often seek media attention to gain traction for their views. Media attention is scarce, however, and previous research shows that this attention tends to be directed toward more resourceful interest groups. We build on this and argue that interest groups with stronger organizational ties to political parties are more likely to appear in the news, and that this effect is positively conditioned by parties’ media attention. Organizational ties facilitate collaboration between the actors, allow for coordination of media strategies, and enable the actors to draw on each other’s media networks. Journalists may furthermore deem interest groups with stronger ties to parties as more newsworthy. We find support for our hypotheses using detailed survey data on organizational ties and a corpus of daily news content across twelve newspapers in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom between 2016 and 2018. The study suggests that organizational connections between groups and political parties can widen media coverage of groups by promoting those that parties favor for reasons beyond their resources. Since stronger organizational ties grant interest groups direct access to political parties, the findings above all imply that media coverage of groups mimics existing patterns of access to key political decision makers.

This research note investigates how the involvement of firms in American politics has developed over the past two decades. The central question is whether individual firms have become more active lobbyists compared to business associations in the US Congress over this period. Different subdisciplines in political science have various expectations regarding the evolution of firm lobbying. We test which perspective is most accurate. To evaluate the hypotheses, we use a novel dataset comprising approximately 180,000 instances of lobbying activity by different types of interest organizations across a wide range of sectors and issues. In our analyses, we trace both the relative activity of firms versus business associations and their centrality in lobbying networks. While most theoretical models in the literature suggest a rise of firm lobbying activity, our results highlight a strikingly stable pattern of firm lobbying activity and centrality within the US political system over the past two decades.

Legislators may consider the preferences of both business actors and citizens when making trade policy decisions. But when business and citizen preferences diverge, what makes legislators more responsive to one side or the other? We argue that when levels of political engagement are kept constant, legislators are more responsive to citizens than business. This effect should be particularly large for left-leaning legislators and legislators who conceive of themselves as delegates. We use three survey experiments with over 1000 legislators from 47 countries across the globe and qualitative evidence from an open survey question and 30 interviews with legislators to test our expectations. Based on this unique evidence, we find strong support for our expectations. These findings contribute to research on trade policy-making, the interaction between elites and the public in international relations, and responsiveness.

Once a focus of political science, interest group studies lost prominence before a resurgence over the past 25 years. Today, scholars around the globe are paying more attention to interest groups, and studies of interest group politics in the American states are leading the way due to uniquely transparent disclosure regulations for lobbyists and institutional variation across state governments. This review charts the theoretical and methodological contributions that fueled this evolution and highlights lessons to be gleaned from contemporary American state scholarship. Findings include how structural power is a source of leverage for lobbyists, how interest groups venue shop within a state government from the legislature to bureaucracy and even elected agencies, and how sometimes the enactment of legislation is only the beginning of group influence.

Understanding how political information is transmitted requires tools that can reliably and scalably capture complex signals in text. While existing studies highlight interest groups as strategic information providers, empirical analysis has been constrained by reliance on expert annotation. Using policy documents released by interest groups, this study shows that fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) outperform lightly trained workers, crowdworkers, and zero-shot LLMs in distinguishing two difficult-to-separate categories: informative signals that help improve political decision-making and associative signals that shape preferences but lack substantive relevance. We further demonstrate that the classifier generalizes out of distribution across two applications. Although the empirical setting is domain-specific, the approach offers a scalable method for expert-driven text coding applicable to other areas of political inquiry.

How do citizen interest groups influence policy in domains dominated by political and economic elites? Recent research suggests their success hinges on outsider strategies to pressure policymakers, such as mobilizing public opinion. In contrast, a feminist platform named Platform for Equal and Non-transferable Birth and Adoption Leave (PPiiNA) built insider alliances with female politicians across party lines to make paternity and maternity leave equal and non-transferable in Spain in 2019. This article explores this case in depth by tracing almost 20 years of policy evolution through parliamentary documents and interviews. Against employer opposition and the absence of trade unions, the case corroborates the relevance of women in politics by illustrating how descriptive representation can open insider channels of influence to feminist advocacy groups. Nonetheless, the approval of the reform ultimately depended on left-wing governing power, while policy formulation was dominated by political elites and employer groups, limiting the capacity of cross-partisan feminist alliances to shape final policy output.

Interest groups spend large amounts of money on public campaigns, but do these outside lobbying strategies change public opinion? Several recent studies investigate this question, but come to different conclusions. We integrate existing approaches into one factorial design and conduct a well-powered survey experiment across two countries. We randomize type of interest group support and message medium in support of two prominent climate policies. Our results suggest that interest group messages can have a short-term influence on public opinion. However, the effects are not different from policy messages without interest groups, are not larger for messages from interest group coalitions, and are only effective for subsidies, but not for increases in taxation. In addition, we investigate the mechanism linking outside lobbying and public opinion and find that outside lobbying signals higher support for policies among the public. Our results have implications for comparative studies of interest group strategies.

Do voters punish local politicians for raising taxes? In California, proposed tax increases must be approved via local ballot measures. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits the narrow passage of local tax initiatives, we find that incumbents do not generally suffer a penalty when cities raise taxes, with the notable exception of business taxes. We explore several mechanisms behind this result and uncover suggestive evidence that business interests may be particularly likely to mobilize following a tax increase. These results suggest that interest groups likely play an important role in determining whether new taxes generate voter backlash.

There is broad consensus that lobbyists with government experience are valuable to those who employ them, principally because they possess contacts in government and unique insights into the policy process. Yet the near exclusive focus on government experience as the defining feature of lobbyist careers, means the literature has neglected analysis of the mix of different (and important) experiences that actual lobbyists likely accumulate during their careers. We address these gaps through analysis of the career sequences of over 600 lobbyists operating across contract and in‐house roles in Australia. Using the tools of sequence and cluster analysis, we identify four broad types of careers among lobbyists. While half of all lobbyists have had roles with some direct political experience, we find that distinctions between types of lobbying careers are differentiated by experience in other fields such as journalism, public relations, associations and corporate life. Moreover, our multivariate analysis shows that different career types are more strongly associated with in‐house versus contract lobbying roles. We conclude that scholars should move beyond a focus on ‘revolving doors’ to more directly analyse the range of experiences that lobbyists leverage in their professional lives.

This article seeks to explain the use of inside and outside lobbying by organised interests at global diplomatic conferences. At first sight, the lobbying at these venues is puzzling as it does not seem to be a very fruitful way to acquire influence. The use of outside strategies especially is perplexing because most aspects of international negotiations fall outside of the purview of national constituencies. It is argued in this article, however, that the presence of outside lobbying is not so puzzling if lobbying is seen both as a way to attain influence and as a way to pursue organisational maintenance goals. Empirically, the article draws on interview data with 232 interest group representatives that participated at either the 2012 session of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Geneva, or the 2011 (Durban) and 2012 (Doha) United Nations Climate Conferences. The analysis demonstrates that organisational needs, and especially the competition actors face in obtaining resources, significantly affects the relative focus of organised interests on inside and outside lobbying.

Political parties and interest groups play a vital role in incorporating societal interests into democratic decision‐making. Therefore, explaining the nature and variation in the relationship between them will advance our understanding of democratic governance. Existing research has primarily drawn attention to how exchange of resources shapes these relationships largely neglecting the role of contextual conditions. Our contribution is to examine whether parties’ structured interactions with different categories of interest groups vary systematically with the pattern of party competition at the level of policy dimensions. First, we argue that higher party fragmentation in a policy space makes organisational ties to interest groups more likely, due to fears of voter loss and splinter groups. Second, we expect higher polarisation between parties on a policy dimension to make ties to relevant groups less likely due to increased electoral costs. We find support for both expectations when analysing new data on 116 party units in 13 mature democracies along nine different policy dimensions. Our findings underline the value of considering the strategic context in which parties and interest groups interact to understand their relationship. The study sheds new light on parties and interest groups as intermediaries in democracy and contributes to a new research agenda connecting interest group research with studies of parties’ policy positions and responsiveness.

We examine the existence and strength of organizational ties between parties and interest groups by innovating on classic resource exchange theory. First, we propose that the nature of interest groups’ policy orientation and their general organizational capacity primarily explain the presence of ties, that is, ties are less likely to materialize when groups lack ideological policy goals and have limited organizational capacity. Second, the size and types of resources on offer from both sides are what principally account for the strength of existing ties. We hypothesize that resources from both parties and interest groups are positively associated with institutionalized relationships, but also that resources are hierarchically ordered, that is, resources that are exclusive for the transaction are particularly important for ties at higher levels of institutionalization. Using data from a novel organizational survey of parties and interest groups in seven Western democracies, we find support for the hypotheses using an integrated design of analysis.

This study examines interest groups’ agenda‐setting influence, a question extensively theorised but lacking empirical investigation. Specifically, it explores whether business groups are more effective than citizen groups in pushing their ‘dream’ issues on the policy agenda while keeping their ‘nightmare’ issues off. Empirically, I rely on a content analysis of 818 media articles, 37 interviews with public officials and 148 interviews with interest representatives, all involved in 56 EU policy issues. The findings demonstrate that citizen groups are more influential in the agenda‐setting stage when compared to their business counterparts, particularly when they garner media visibility. These results bear important implications for democratic governance, offering new insights into the political influence wielded by interest groups.