The rewriting of government bills: the (ir)relevance of interest organizations

The article analyses a subject in interest group studies that has been little investigated. Focusing on legislative lobbying and the early stage of the legislative process, it studies the rewriting of 50 (or more) ministerial draft bills in a parliamentary democracy. The aim is to look into the reasons for amending ministerial draft bills until their passage by cabinet. The paper analyzes whether the studied draft bills were amended as a result of inter-ministerial debates, position-taking by the Federal Council in German federalism, or the consultation of interest groups on these proposals. Controlling for the impact of federalism and inter-bureaucratic turf (among others), the article will assess whether (a) interest group types, (b) interest group resources (c) formal and informal access to policy-makers, and (d) insider status in government and parliament matter to the content of bills. The dependent variable indicates whether bills were amended as a result of the main predictors so that the empirical analysis will be conducted by means of a binary logistic regression. The paper draws on several newly available data sources about the formulation of German government bills and integrates them. These sources include: ministerial web-information on legislative consultations that is published since 2019, more than 100 parliamentary questions about the access of interest group to formal consultations, top officials and ministers, the revised registry of interest groups maintained by the German parliament that is online since 2022, as well as the official documentation of German legislative processes by the German parliament and its committees. Altogether, the paper will analyze about 50 (+) federal government bills in different policy areas on which more than 2,000 interest groups were consulted, either formally or informally. The bills were submitted to parliament in 2019. The analysis is meant to shed light on the importance of interest groups in federal legislation when controlled for German federalism, coalition government and bureaucratic politics, and issue contexts.