Conceptualizing and Measuring Parliamentary Party Groups’ Lobbying Safeguards

Parties’ collaboration with interest groups is both important and perilous for democratic governance. Interest groups can both strengthen (in their function as “democratic transmission belts”) and weaken the linkage between voters and representatives. As the erosion of traditional social cleavages has led political parties to interact with a more diverse set of interest groups, the risk of parties being sidetracked by interest groups has increased. The present article studies how parliamentary party groups manage this risk through so-called “lobbying safeguards”. These can be understood as rules and practices within the parliamentary group that help curtailing potentially problematic relationships to IGs. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with current and former members of both the National Assembly of Québec and the Parliament of Canada, we proceed to an exhaustive mapping of these practices. In a second step, we reflect on how the presence of such safeguards can be assessed in the context of specific policy issues. In this manner, we seek to contribute to studying how the party rationale impinges upon the relationship between the individual MP and the interest group.