Making Inference across Mobilisation and Influence Research: Comparing Top-Down and Bottom-Up Mapping of Interest Systems
| Author | Jan Beyers,Joost Berkhout,Caelesta Braun,David Lowery,Marcel Hanegraaff |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717702400 |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717702400
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(1) 43 –62
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717702400
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Making Inference across
Mobilisation and Influence
Research: Comparing Top-
Down and Bottom-Up Mapping
of Interest Systems
Joost Berkhout1, Jan Beyers2,Caelesta Braun3,
Marcel Hanegraaff1 and David Lowery4
Abstract
Scholars of mobilisation and policy influence employ two quite different approaches to mapping
interest group systems. Those interested in research questions on mobilisation typically rely
on a bottom-up mapping strategy in order to characterise the total size and composition of
interest group communities. Researchers with an interest in policy influence usually rely on a
top-down strategy in which the mapping of politically active organisations depends on samples of
specific policies. But some scholars also use top-down data gathered for other research questions
on mobilisation (and vice versa). However, it is currently unclear how valid such large-N data
for different types of research questions are. We illustrate our argument by addressing these
questions using unique data sets drawn from the INTEREURO project on lobbying in the European
Union and the European Union’s Transparency Register. Our findings suggest that top-down and
bottom-up mapping strategies lead to profoundly different maps of interest group communities.
Keywords
interest groups, interest group populations, lobbying, European Union
Accepted: 30 December 2016
For most of the history of scholarship on the politics of interest representation, research was
largely confined to only a few interest organisations1 or a limited set of policymaking areas.
The reasons for this were a lack of data on larger communities of organisations and their
1Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
3Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University, The Hague, The Netherlands
4Department of Political Science, Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA
Corresponding author:
Marcel Hanegraaff, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166,
1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: m.c.hanegraaff@uva.nl
702400PSX0010.1177/0032321717702400Political StudiesBerkhout et al.
research-article2017
Article
44 Political Studies 66(1)
lobbying activities. Some notable scholarship was generated from this early empirical work,
and much of this remains relevant to our understanding of interest group politics to this day
(Witko, 2015). Still, following the strong advice of Baumgartner and Leech in their 1998
book, Basic Interests, the last two decades have seen a flowering of large-N research on
interest groups (see reviews in Bunea and Baumgartner, 2014; Hojnacki et al., 2012).
Especially in the last few years, we have seen a sharp increase of studies and many new
initiatives to map entire interest group populations. This now includes projects in a wide
range of countries, such as the United States (Baumgartner and Leech, 2001; Gray and
Lowery, 1996), Germany (Klüver, 2015), Denmark (Binderkrantz et al., 2014), Sweden
(Naurin and Boräng, 2012), Great Britain (Helboe Pedersen et al., 2015), Scotland (Halpin
et al., 2012), Belgium (Fraussen et al., 2014), The Netherlands (Poppelaars, 2009), Spain
(Chaqués-Bonafont and Muñoz Márquez, 2016), Switzerland (Gava et al., 2015), Italy
(Lizzi and Pritoni, 2014), France (Berkhout, 2015), Australia (Fraussen and Halpin, 2016)
and Canada (Johnson, 2013). Beyond these national populations, research endeavours have
also extended their focus towards transnational interest group communities, such as the
European Union (Berkhout and Lowery, 2011; Coen and Katsaitis, 2013; Greenwood and
Dreger, 2013), and even at various international organisations (Hanegraaff, 2015).
Given the growth of studies mapping interest group populations in recent years, one
important question arising from these research endeavours is to what extent these efforts
lead to valid knowledge on the politics of interest representation. That is, these mapping
strategies range between mapping concrete political activities associated with particular
policies (a variation of what we term top-down mapping) and mapping interest organisa-
tions via lobby registration or census data and not specifically associated with a given
policymaking trajectory (which we term ‘bottom-up mapping’). And some scholars rou-
tinely use these mapping strategies interchangeably to assess the political influence
organised interests enjoy and varying mobilisation patterns (see below).
A specific example of this interchangeable use of these two types of data (top-down and
bottom-up) concerns the demand-side hypothesis, namely that lobbying is largely a
response to government activity. We see at least three types of data used to assess the
veracity of the conjecture. First, early tests of this hypothesis were largely case-oriented;
for instance, Heinz et al. (1993) examined the population of interest organisations actively
lobbying on four policy cases. Second, Leech et al. (2005) tested the hypothesis by exam-
ining the relationship between the legislative agenda of the US Congress across a variety
of topics and the total number of lobby organisations registered within different sectors
related to those topics. Using similar general registers, Coen and Katsaitis (2013) and
Broscheid and Coen (2007) relate the numbers of lobbyists showing interest in the
policies of distinct Directorates-General (DGs) of the European Commission (EC) to the
information ‘needs’ of the policymakers. Third, most removed from actually lobbying,
Baumgartner and Shoub (2015) tested the same hypothesis with agenda data and the num-
ber of organisations listed in the Encyclopedia of Associations, a directory of organisations
better suited to studying the precursors to mobilisation than lobbying per se (see also
Jordan et al., 2012). Indeed, the vast majority of the organisations listed in such directories
do not engage in any lobbying activity at all. Empirical tests of the demand hypothesis,
then, employ a variety of measures of interest organisation populations.
Extracting conclusions about the mobilisation of organised interests from data on the
explicit political activities of organised interests requires, however, that the diversity of
interests active on a sample of ongoing policies map in an isomorphic manner on the
diversity of the larger interest system. Or, vice versa, claims on political influence from
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