Interest Group – Party Collaboration in Multi-Party Democracies

Many advanced democracies have a long standing tradition of cooperation between parties and interest groups. Recent years have advanced our understanding of these links by developing typologies of the different types of linkage and conducting studies of variation in the overall degree of interest group-party linkage (see e.g. Allern, 2010, Allern et al., 2007, Rasmussen and Lindeboom, 2012). As a next step, we propose to look closer at what determines links between specific interest groups and political parties. To do so we develop a model, which predicts an interest group’s degree of collaboration with a party based on a series of factors related to the background characteristics of the two. The model is tested by linking data on political parties with data from a recent project (Rasmussen, 2012, Rasmussen and Lindeboom, 2012) in which more than 750 Danish and Dutch interest groups were surveyed about their degree of collaboration with the different parties represented in their national parliaments. Our findings find similarities in the factors conditioning interest group party links in Denmark and the Netherlands, but also indicate that differences in cabinet governance in the two systems lead to different patterns of interest group – party cooperation. In Denmark, where governments tend to alternate between left and right, cooperation between parties and interest groups follows a similar left-right division. In contrast, such cooperation follows a division between core and marginal parties in the Netherlands, where change in government composition is typically only partial.