Bureaucrats’ motivations and expectations concerning interest group involvement in policy-making

In policy-making, interest groups are often seen as the state’s counterparts in collaborative governance (Torfing, 2019) or as means for improving its policy capacity (Peters, 2015). Seen through a transactional lens, interest groups are expected to provide policy makers with various policy goods, such as information, expertise, political support, or legitimacy, in exchange for access (Braun, 2012). Such a resource exchange perspective does not, however, imply that all policy goods or all interest organizations are considered equal. In this study, utilizing original survey and survey experiment data from the third round of the Norwegian Panel of Public Administrators (Norsk Forvaltningspanel, NFP), we investigate how bureaucrats see the relative importance of different types of interest these groups represent, i.e. business organizations, trade unions, providers, and users of public sector services. In addition, we explore how perceived importance of various policy goods that interest groups are expected to bring to the table varies between agencies and ministries. We distinguish between four types of policy goods: (a) expertise, (b) implementation support, (c) political support, and (d) representation of a relevant stakeholder, where (a) and (b) are more technical and (c) and (d) more political in nature (Braun, 2012). We take as our point of departure the distinction between politics and bureaucracy, recognizing that while the NFP participants are all bureaucrats, they are employed in entities that have different roles in the policy making process: ministries are primarily responsible for general policy development and agencies for implementation. Such difference in roles translates into an expectation that those employed in ministries are expected to give primacy to political goods while those employed in agencies are expected to give primacy to technical policy goods. Finally, through our survey experiment, we explore whether bureaucrats prioritize (a) quality or (b) legitimacy of policy decisions as the key reason for involvement of interest groups. The juxtaposition of quality to legitimacy reflects the grouping of policy goods into more technical and more political in nature. We explore whether this varies depending on the scope of policy change. Here we contrast substantial changes of the fundamental principles under which a certain policy domain operates with minor adjustment of existing policy instruments (Hall, 1993). As substantial changes require support from key stakeholder, we expect that bureaucrats give primacy to legitimacy, while with regards to minor adjustments of policy instruments we see nuanced knowledge of the policy domain as more relevant and thus expect bureaucrats to give primacy to quality. References Braun, C. (2012). The Captive or the Broker? Explaining Public Agency–Interest Group Interactions. Governance, 25(2), 291-314. Hall, P. A. (1993). Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics, 25(3), 275-296. Peters, B. G. (2015). State failure, governance failure and policy failure: Exploring the linkages. Public Policy and Administration, 30(3-4), 261-276. Torfing, J. (2019). Collaborative innovation in the public sector: the argument. Public Management Review, 21(1), 1-11.