Mapping interest group access to politics: a presentation of the INTERARENA research project
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Mapping interest group access to politics: a presentation of the INTERARENA research project Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz1 · Peter Munk Christiansen1 · Helene Helboe Pedersen1 Published online: 13 August 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract Studies of the political role of interest groups rely on mapping their presence in politics. This article presents the INTERARENA research project which mapped interest group access to the administration, parliament and the news media across several countries. The project departed from a definition of access that emphasized the role of gatekeepers in different political arenas.The article discusses the ambitions of the research project and the subsequent choice of empirical indicators for political access. In addition, it presents the data sources used and provides an overview of the data collected. The described datasets are available online for other researchers interested in empirical mapping of group access to politics. Keywords Interest groups · Access · Political arenas
Introduction Access to political arenas is central for any political actor trying to influence politics. Without political access, interest groups and other actors are not able to advance their viewpoints and influence political decisions—including decisions about what issues should be on the political agenda. While the ultimate goal for interest groups is usually political influence, access is thus a crucial intermediary step toward this goal (Binderkrantz et al. 2017a). In effect, political access has also been a focus point of interest group scholars (Truman 1951: 264). The study of political influence comes with challenges with respect to conceptualization and empirical measurement, and many have found access a more empirically feasible concept when it comes to evaluating the political Access to datasets and codebook: www.interarena.dk * Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz [email protected] 1
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Vol:.(1234567890)
Mapping interest group access to politics: a presentation…
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role of interest groups. This article presents the data used in the INTERARENA research project to analyze interest group access in different political arenas (Binderkrantz et al. 2015), over time (Binderkrantz and Christiansen 2015; Binderkrantz et al. 2016) and across different countries (Binderkrantz et al. 2017b; Christiansen et al. 2018; Pedersen et al. 2015). The INTERARENA project was carried out by a group of researchers at Aarhus University in collaboration with researchers at other universities.1 The project was the first to study interest group access in a cross-arena perspective, and most of the datasets collected by the research group have been made available for other researchers to use. Even though access lends itself more readily to empirical analysis than influence, it does not come without tradeoffs and pitfalls. This article therefore discusses the challenges related to empirical measurement of access in politics. In addition, it presents specific indicators of access used in
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