Funding:
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Principal Investigators:
Prof. Dr. Patrick Bernhagen
Dr. Florian Spohr
Research Assistants:
Nils Burgheim
Krispin Krüger
The research project “Populations, Access and Bias in Multilevel Lobbying” (PABIM) aims to assess interest group bias in mobilization and access on the subnational, national, and European level. It builds upon the research of the project “Lobbying Across Multiple Levels: German Federal Institutions, European Union, and the Länder (LiM)”, which has analyzed access and strategies of organized interest in the German multilevel system. Building on this work, PABIM expands our research focus to interest group populations. This enables us to assess the size and direction of bias both in the composition of the interest group systems at each level and in the representation of societal interests in political institutions. Linking the top-down sampling of lobbyists from the LiM project with bottom-up mapping of interest group populations allows inferences about bias and strengthens the external validity of the findings from the first project. To do this, we proceed in two steps:
The first step involves a comparison of interest group populations in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and the EU. To compile a comparative dataset across these three levels of government we will combine a directory-based, bottom-up mapping of interest group populations with a top-down sampling of lobby registration data on the three levels. The population data will not only allow us to assess to what extent and to whose advantage the interest group systems on the three levels are biased but also pave the ground to investigate bias in the access of organized interests across a range of venues. We measure access to policy venues using a short online questionnaire asking the lobbyists we identify about their contacts to the political venues at the three levels. In addition to interest associations, we also include other organized interests, such as business corporations, in our analysis. We pay particular attention to umbrella organizations to gain insights in how interest groups organize and divide labor across levels of the political system.
By assessing bias in populations and access on the regional, national and EU level, PABIM will yield important insight into the (in)equality of political representation.