Interest group influence in local governance. Mayors’ and councillors’ perceptions of being pressured in Spain, France and Italy
Navarro, Carmen; Medina, Ivan & Khalil, Nadia
As widely discussed in Interest Groups literature, we lack of proper means to measure influence, leading to an empirical misunderstanding of interest groups’ actual achievements, which is only replaced by patchy theoretical assumptions.
As the discussion on how to operationalise influence remains inconclusive, our attempt is to examine the feasability of measuring interest groups influence through indirect sources, that is measuring influence from the perception of those who have been pressured. This strategy allows us to focus influence on issues such as the conditions to access to political decision-makers, frequency of contacts between groups and politicians, institutional recognition of interest groups, existing trust involving governments and interest groups, and indirect perception of interest groups’ influence and intentions.
The proposal focuses on local politics and is based on quantitative data. As part of the POLLEADER (Political Leaders in European Local Governments) and MAELG (Municipal Assemblies in European Local Governments) international research projects, we use the database built from questionnaires to mayors and local councilors of municipalities above 10.000 inhabitants from seventeen European countries. The database gathers more than 20.000 responses and contains information on several interest groups such as issue-single groups, business, trade unions, church, environmentalist, and so forth. In this analysis we focus on the cases of France, Italy as athese countries belong to the “Franco group” of local government form with distinctive patterns of institutions and governance networks.
Dr. Carmen Navarro (Autonomous University of Madrid) is specialised on local politics and co-responsible of the POLLEADER and MAELG Spanish team; Iván Medina (Autonomous University of Barcelona) is about to defend his Thesis on regional business associations, and has published on Muslim interest groups in local politics; and Nadia Khalil (Autonomous University of Barcelona) is currently a PhD Student working on local interest groups dynamics in Europe.
