Informational Demand across the Globe: Towards a Comparative Understanding of Information Exchange

Information is a crucial commodity in lobbying processes. Non-state actors provide expertise to time-pressured and understaffed policymakers and hope to gain access or influence in return. This information exchange perspective to lobbying has received widespread scholarly support in the interest group literature. Most studies have applied this perspective to non-state actors in Western countries. We argue that the information exchange perspective to lobbying is also useful to understand lobbying activities of non-state actors outside the western hemisphere. Therefore, this paper seeks to explain why policymakers in countries across the globe provide access to non-state actors. The main argument we posit is that policymakers from developing countries are more receptive to interest groups that can provide technical information and interest groups that are supportive to their cause. In contrast, policymakers from developed countries are more open to political information and groups with a different view than their own. Understanding the differences in informational dependencies between developing and developed countries is important to situate the boundaries and applicability of the research exchange theory beyond Western-democracies. It provides insight into how lobbying processes differ from one country to another and to what extent theories developed in Western democracies travel well beyond the northern hemisphere. The data is retrieved from interviews with 129 policymakers stemming from 61 countries working in the fields of transnational trade and environmental governance. The analysis is a first comparative analysis of interest groups access across the globe.