The Emergence and Development of Global Interest Communities

One important question for interest group scholars concerns how interest communities emerge and develop over time. Two key perspectives dominate our thinking on this issue. The first theoretical perspective claims that collective action problems lead to a biased system of interest representation in which especially specialized or business interests will dominate interest communities. Ecological perspectives are less focused on the collective action societal constituencies face, but claim that countervailing mechanisms and competition within interest communities may lead to a rather balanced system of interest representation. Both theoretical perspectives have been extensively tested in domestic settings. In this paper, we show that they are also useful for understanding and explaining the emergence and development of global interest communities. Our paper will test some of the key hypotheses of both perspectives on interest community development in two international venues: the Ministerial Conferences of the WTO and the Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC. By analysing the dynamics of these interest communities over a period of 15 years, our study allows for a rigorous test of general interest community theories within a global setting. The approach we develop paves the way to more systematic research on global governance processes and it allows for comparative research into generic patterns of interest community development that transcends the domestic institutional context.