The growing number of interest groups active at the international level intrigues many political scientists. Most current explanations of global lobbying emphasize strategic incentives, such as venue-shopping, hereby arguing that interest groups strategically and consciously choose to enter the international domain. Although probably true to a large degree, strategy-based models ignore the fact that strategic action is heavily constrained by contextual factors, such as available resources within the groups’ environment as well as institutional opportunities at the domestic and the international level. Although the impact of contextual explanations has been demonstrated for both the US and the EU case, no study has been dedicated to test the impact of contextual factors for interest groups that enter the international domain. This is problematic, as we generally see biases in global lobbying in favor of certain countries, which cannot be entirely explained by focusing on strategic incentives alone. Our paper will offer a contextualized approach for explaining variation in the amount of interest groups that lobby at WTO Ministerial Conferences. More in particular, we will focus on the effects of domestic variables (economic, social and political), the political attention of the WTO towards certain issues, and competition effects due to in- or decreased density of the WTO interest group population, on the number of interest groups that attend WTO Ministerial Conferences. Our data-set (with about 2000 different organizations) allows us to identify which structural forces shape the strategic choices of interest groups that aim to lobby at the international level.
