Influencing Politics, Politicians and Bureaucrats: Explaining Differences Between Swedish CSO's Strategies to Promote Political and Social Change

This paper aims at analyzing the way in which Swedish civil society organizations (CSO) make use of different strategies for the purpose of influencing bureaucracy intended both as civil servants and politicians. Such strategies can be of different kinds e.g. advocacy through media, lobbying, organizational capacity building and street protests. Our analysis will include different types of organizations (e.g. trade unions, users’ organizations, political organizations) working with different issues and within different policy areas. We will also explore the correlation between such organizational strategies and the organizations’ economic resources, their assessment of the most important administrative level for influence (local, regional, national, EU, international) and their perceived effectiveness of working at different levels. The paper draws on the extensive literature on political opportunity structures and multi-level governance and provides a basis for theorizing about different institutional explanations (e.g. degree of institutional access at national level, match/mismatch between EU policies, domestic and local policies etc.) and organizational explanations (e.g. organizational resources). The analysis will deepen our understanding of CSOs’ different strategies for influencing bureaucracy. The paper is built on unique empirical data from a recently conducted survey based on a sample of 6.180 Swedish CSOs. It is the first time that this Swedish data is presented at an international conference.