Mobilization Bias Versus Access Bias: Comparing Interest Group Populations with Access to Political Institutions Across Multiple Levels

Interest representation can be biased at several stages of the influence production process. While at the stage of mobilization, some interests may be more successful at organizing than others, at the stage of access, policymakers consult with interest groups selectively. Furthermore, bias in both the mobilization of interests and their access to policymaking may differ between levels and venues, where the two types of bias may reinforce or cancel out each other. Against a background of inconclusive findings regarding the direction and scope of these biases, this paper assesses bias in mobilization and access across the regional, national, and European level of government in a single research design. Lacking an independent benchmark of what an unbiased interest group system looks like, we start from the assumption that to detect and assess bias in access we must not only compare the shares of interest types with access to political institutions, but also consider their distribution in the overall population. Hence, we will assess interest representation in policymaking by comparing interest groups that gained access to political participation with the wider population of interest groups. Given collective action problems, we expect that specific interests have an advantage at the stage of mobilization. However, as they are aware of the resulting overrepresentation of specific interests, policymakers are expected to redress this imbalance by seeking to provide more equal access to the different interests. In addition to the type of interest an organization represents, its territorial scope and organizational remit may affect its chances to gain access to political institutions. On the subnational level, regional associations are important, not least because subnational institutions are dependent on regionally specific societal input. The same applies to companies, which often have good contacts to the political authorities at the local and regional level. By contrast, at higher levels the multiplying number of stakeholders makes it increasingly difficult to take all interests into account. This is why policymakers often prefer to speak to umbrella organizations that can aggregate the input from their member organizations. Similarly, EU institutions facilitate access for European interest groups with a supranational scope which can aggregate the various national interests. Empirically, we investigate the case of Germany. In a first step, we map the interest group population of the German Land Baden-Württemberg and classify all groups according to their organizational structure and the type of interest they represent. In order to capture their political mobilization on the three levels – regional, national, and European – we then trace which of these interest groups and companies based in Baden-Württemberg are present in the respective lobby registers. Furthermore, we conduct a survey among these approximately 1.400 actors to gain data about their access to venues on the regional, national, and EU-level.