How Parties’ Relationships with Interest Groups Differ in Old Democracies

It is widely assumed that the relationship between parties and interest groups helps shape the nature of democratic governance. Still, party-group relationships have been largely overlooked by political scientists to date and taken for granted across different countries, institutional set-ups, types of party systems, and sectors. This paper explores and assesses the relationships of political parties with various types of interest groups in mature democracies across the world. It contributes to conceptual and methodological debate by discussing how to understand and measure party-interest group relationships in organizational terms, as well as how to document to what extent and in what way parties’ relationships with organized interests differ today. Are parties’ relational ties to organized interests strong, weak or non-existent? To what extent do the relationships vary across parties and interest group types? How exclusive/inclusive are the parties’ individual networks? And is there variation in the relational ties between parties and interest groups at the country-level? Using a new comparative dataset generated by the PAIRDEM project from a variety of sources (including party statutes and questionnaires to key informants in both extra-legislative organizations and legislative party groups), we are able to compare both the overall ties of minor and major parties’ to interest groups and their relational ties to key categories of organized interests across 21 different democracies.