Comparing and Analysing Party-Group Interaction in Four European Countries

Nowadays voters increasingly lament the ability of political parties to represent their interests. Recent research shows that partially as a response to this, some political parties are (again) becoming more grass-roots orientated. One important indication of this is the varying propensity of political parties to interact, ally and coalesce with civil society organisations. According to some party scholars, these networks are an important way for parties to keep a finger at societies’ pulse. However, civil society organisations themselves vary strongly in both the extent to which they are rooted in society but also in terms of their ideological beliefs. In this paper we analyse how interest organisations interact in different ways with different political parties. One of the major questions thereby is whether these interactions are driven by power and/or ideological allegiances. Ideological allegiance implies that groups coalesce primarily with and seek to support like-minded politicians, irrespective of whether these parties have legislative and executive powers. If this is the dominant pattern, interest group-party interactions are a key ingredient of ongoing political-ideological debates. However, ideational allegiance might be less relevant if groups primarily prioritize parties when these possess governing powers or parties that mobilize a considerable part of the electorate. Consequently groups will show a lower inclination to approach fringe, opposition or peripheral parties. Empirically we rely on comparative survey evidence collected amongst more than 2500 interest groups in four countries, Slovenia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden (www.cigsurvey.eu). In this survey we assessed (1) the political views of interest groups on the basis of the GALTAN-scale and (2) we map the extent to which organized interest effectively interact with (39) political parties that have a seat in the national parliament.