Interest Group Influence in 'the Good Old Days' and Today

It has been widely argued that the circumstances for interest groups seeking political influence have changed over the last decade. The erosion of class society has weakened the links between socioeconomic groups and parties, and thus also the links between political parties and groups (Allern & Bale, 2012). The media has come to play a more prominent role (Bernhagen & Trani, 2012) . And many former corporatist countries have experienced declining corporatism (Rommetvedt et al., 2012) . These societal developments implicate that interest groups need to seek out new influence strategies (Binderkrantz, 2003). Most importantly they may also have changed the patterns of interest group access and influence. Investigating interest group influence is challenging and in particular it is difficult to establish appropriate measures of influence over time. In this paper we take access to central political arenas (media, parliament, and bureaucracy) as an indicator of influence and use a unique dataset of Danish interest groups to compare group arena access in "the good old days" (1975/76) to group access today (2009/10). This allows us to investigate possible changes in the type of groups winning access as well as in the overlap between access in different arenas. Are public interest groups more influential actors today? Were groups more likely to show up in all arenas in the days of corporatism? Have financial resources become more important? In short is interest group involvement in political processes more diversified or concentrated today than it used to be?