Assessing Informational Lobbying in German Animal Welfare Policy

Democratic policy making involves stakeholder organizations which participate in political processes. This also applies for German farm animal policy as a sub-_eld of agricultural policy. Issues of animal welfare clearly affect farmers and other actors along the supply chain, but also animal protectors and costumers. Hence, organized interest groups try to influence farm animal policy at several stages. They are not only embedded in parliamentary hearings, but their participation is also part of the Government's comprehensive farm animal husbandry strategy. Thus, it is worth to quantify the influence of these organizations in the political processes. Moreover, it would be interesting to see how communication of expert knowledge changes policy positions regarding four selected policies that are on the political agenda: the collective right of action for animal protection groups, a standardized testing and approval procedure for mass-produced livestock facilities and a validation of competence regarding animal husbandry as well as a ban of transport of living animals in countries outside the European Union. Beside classical vote buying, i.e. the exchange of power resources and political control over policy issues, informational lobbying serves as an impact tool. Stakeholder organizations of a policy _eld make use of their expert knowledge in order to change the policy beliefs of decision makers. Policy beliefs are naive heuristics regarding the relation between a policy and the intended outcome. Thus, they influence which policy has to be chosen in order to achieve a specific goal. We apply a social network approach to assess patterns of informational lobbying among the stakeholders of German farm animal policy. Data used stem from an elite survey including the most important actors of German farm animal husbandry. We first show which organizations have substantial impact in the policy field. To complement the quantitative influence measures, we show how policy beliefs regarding the four policies mentioned above are changed by communicational power. Second, we estimate Exponential Random Graph Models to identify the network generating process of the communication structure. These estimates also allow to check the robustness of results by simulating 10,000 network configurations. Our results show that agricultural producers are the main drivers of expert knowledge in German livestock politics. Organizations of animal protection serve as their counterparts. Both groups are the most influential actors within the policy network. This pattern seems to be confirmed by estimation results of our exponential random graph model. They show significant positive effects for senders of ties belonging either to the agribusiness set or to the group of animal protection organizations. Political agents, i.e. parliamentary groups and public administration, act as knowledge demander. The corresponding estimates are also positive, confirming that legislative actors as well as executive branch seek for expert information. Nevertheless, social embeddedness is also a key factor that affects tie creation. Regarding policies our results imply that informational lobbying slightly moves the policy positions for all issues in a lower direction, i.e. weakens their evaluation regarding usefulness to achieve more animal welfare.