Do the Privileged Benefit When Under Pressure? Explaining Patterns of Interest Group Access Under Conditions of Conflict and Political Polarization

Caelesta Braun and Ida Hobma, Leiden University, Institute of Public Administration Interest group access to policymakers is a widely researched phenomenon, revealing a persistent pattern of unequal policy access of individual interest groups. Contextual factors, organizational and policy capacities all have been demonstrated to play an important role in explaining these patterns of inequality. The majority of these studies have examined interest group access in relatively stable political arena’s, where the level and nature of policy and political conflicts are generally modest, but can be more intense for certain policy domains. This variation in level of policy-domain conflicts is demonstrated to relate to varying degrees and types of interest group access. Now that many policymakers, politicians and interest groups perceive, or contribute to, intensifying policy and political conflict or even political polarization, this likely has an effect on the level and nature of policy access of interest groups. Based on novel survey data among interest groups in the Netherlands, collected by the authors, we investigate the impact of conflict and political polarization on interest group access to policymakers. We conceive of political polarization as enduring and opposing conflicts between otherwise homogenous groups of societal and political actors. We seek to explain how interest group access varies under conditions of varying levels of conflict as well as political polarization. The replication part of the interest group survey allows us to examine this variation over time, and adds to the cross-sectional analysis. Understanding the relation between conflict, political polarization and interest group access is not only scientifically relevant, as we add to existing resource exchange models on how interest groups perform under conditions of varying levels of conflict. Understanding this variation in interest group access is also societally timely and urgent, given the important representational role of interest groups. The question therefore is: are the commonly identified patterns of unequal access deepened by conflict and political polarization, or not? And if so, how can we remedy this?