Research on lobbying strategies often starts from the assumption that interest groups exchange resources, such as information, money, legitimacy, political support or implementation capacity, for access and influence. This workshop starts from the proposition that lobbying strategies cannot be understood without explaining variation in policymakers’ needs. It seeks to rethink political exchange as a dynamic interaction between heterogeneous and shifting demands from policymakers and varying supplies and strategic responses by interest groups. Its ambition is to develop more specific and empirically testable theories of how the demand side of policymaking structures lobbying strategies and the exchange of resources.
Resource exchange approaches have advanced our understanding of lobbying, including how institutional demands shape access. However, limited attention has been given to how policymakers’ needs may vary and change, and how groups interpret and respond to these differences.
What policymakers seek from interest groups may differ across countries, institutions, policy stages, political roles and levels of issue salience. It may also vary between high politics, characterised by public conflict and partisan competition, and the lower-profile politics of policy design and implementation. These differences could shape which resources groups develop, which strategies they adopt, and explain why some groups are more successful in gaining access and exercising influence.
This workshop connects research on organizational features of groups and different forms of policy engagement to insights about the changing and varying demands of policymakers. It welcomes conceptual contributions that revise, extend or challenge exchange paradigms, alongside empirical papers examining policymakers’ demands and groups’ strategic responses across political systems, institutions and policy domains. Contributions may use qualitative, quantitative, experimental, comparative or mixed-method approaches. We encourage contributions ranging from preliminary research (proposals) to comprehensive papers.
The workshop will bring together scholars studying interest groups, lobbying, political institutions and political behaviour. By focusing on new perspectives on lobby strategies and resource exchange, the workshop will provide insights into contemporary lobbying. Contributions on digital lobbying, misinformation and artificial intelligence fall within the workshop’s scope, provided they are related to the dynamics of exchange relationships. Insights from national context underrepresented in the literature are particularly encouraged.
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1: What do policymakers demand from interest groups, and how can these demands be identified?
2: How do policymakers’ demands vary across political systems, institutions, political roles and policy stages?
3: How do high and low politics shape policymakers’ needs and the resources they value?
4: How do interest groups develop resources and adapt strategies to changing political demands?
5: How do responses to policymakers’ demands shape patterns of access, prominence or influence?
1: Conceptual contributions that revise, extend or challenge resource exchange paradigms
2: Comparative studies of policymakers’ demands across political systems and institutions
3: Variation in resource demands across policy stages, political roles and policy domains
4: Interest groups’ resource development and strategic responses to changing demands of policymakers
5: High and low politics and their implications for political exchange, access and influence
6: Causes and consequences of mismatches between policymakers’ demands and interest groups’ resource supply
7: How digital lobbying, misinformation and AI reshape resource exchange between groups and policymakers
