Policy evaluation in parliament: interest groups as catalysts
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852317750461 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Frédéric Varone,Roy Gava,Pirmin Bundi |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Article
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Policy evaluation in
Sciences
2020, Vol. 86(1) 98–114
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parliament: interest
The Author(s) 2018
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groups as catalysts
DOI: 10.1177/0020852317750461
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
Fre´de´ric Varone
University of Geneva, Department of Political Science and
International Relations, Switzerland
Pirmin Bundi
University of Bern, Institute of Political Science, Switzerland
Roy Gava
University of Geneva, Department of Political Science and
International Relations, Switzerland
Abstract
Members of Parliament (MPs) request policy evaluations and use the resultant findings
to inform law-making and hold the government to account. Since most elected repre-
sentatives have developed strong ties to interest groups, one might wonder whether
these privileged relationships influence MPs’ parliamentary behavior. This study
investigates how MPs’ affiliations to groups affect their demand for policy evaluations.
Empirical evidence shows that, regardless of respective party or individual character-
istics, MPs are more likely to request evaluations in those policy domains where they
have a group affiliation. This effect holds even when controlling for a classical measure
of MP’s policy specialization, such as legislative committee membership. These findings
suggest that ties between MPs and specific types of interest group should be considered
when explaining parliamentary behavior across different policy domains.
Point for practitioners
To influence the policymaking process, interest groups participate in consultation pro-
cedures and parliamentary hearings, they lobby elected officials and deliver policy
expertise to decision-makers. These advocacy strategies are well studied. This article
Corresponding author:
Fre´de´ric Varone, University of Geneva, Unimail Geneva, 1211 Switzerland.
Email: frederic.varone@unige.ch
Varone et al.
99
innovates by showing that, in addition, interest groups foster the development of policy
evaluations. MPs affiliated to an interest group active on a specific issue are likely to
request policy evaluations in that policy domain. Interest groups strengthen the parlia-
mentary demand for evaluation studies and, thus, may potentially contribute to the
accountability of government and public administration.
Keywords
citizen groups, economic groups, evaluation, policy domains
Introduction
Elected Members of Parliament (MPs) are both legislators and controllers of the
government. MPs require information to fulfill these law-making and oversight
functions. Policy evaluation is one potential source of such information, since a
policy evaluation aims to deliver new insights about the quality of a policy design,
the progress of its implementation and its final impacts on economy and society.
MPs are the stakeholders par excellence of policy evaluations (Speer et al., 2015),
whose results should reduce MPs’ uncertainty about policy effects and, further-
more, the information asymmetry between the government and the parliament.
Empirical studies have demonstrated that MPs activate different parliamentary
instruments (e.g. questions, interpellations, motions) to initiate an evaluation, to
monitor an evaluation process and to ask about concrete evaluation findings. In
addition, MPs directly use the knowledge provided to improve their own decision-
making and to hold government to account (Bundi, 2016; Jacob et al., 2015; Speer
et al., 2015; Zwaan et al., 2016). Previous research delivered three findings on the
factors explaining why an MP will demand or use a policy evaluation report. First,
MPs’ attention to evaluation is unequally distributed between policy sectors (e.g.
great attention to education or health policy versus low attention to public finance
or defense policy). Second, MPs belonging both to the opposition and to the
political parties forming the government (coalition) request evaluations: the
former need evaluative evidence to scrutinize and challenge the government, and
the latter instrumentalize evaluation to highlight and publicize the policy activities
and performance of their own ministers. Finally, socioeconomic as well as partisan
characteristics of MPs (e.g. age, education, seniority in parliament, party member-
ship) seem to have little to no influence at all on an MP’s evaluation activity. In
contrast, membership in an oversight committee as well as a positive attitude
towards evaluation in general increases MPs’ motivation to request evaluation
reports (Bundi, 2016).
The role of interest groups as a factor explaining the parliamentary requests of
policy evaluations remains unexplored. This is an important research gap since
evaluation reports are by no means the only source of policy-relevant information
100
International Review of Administrative Sciences 86(1)
for MPs. Interest groups, which often represent the target groups or beneficiaries
of the policies to be evaluated, are a valued source of expertise. For instance,
interest groups deliver information through lobbying activities targeting individual
MPs, actively participate in official consultations procedures, and present testimo-
nies during the hearings organized by legislative committees. By means of these
advocacy strategies, interest groups provide their expertise as an ‘exchange good’
to access the parliamentary venue (Bouwen, 2002).
At the same time, interest groups also encourage MPs to evaluate specific pol-
icies. Evaluation might be highly rewarding for an interest group if the resulting
evaluation allows for keeping an issue important to the group constituency on the
parliamentary agenda, revising a law in a policy direction that better fits the group
preferences, or (re)legitimating the implementation tasks formally delegated to the
group. Various motivations lead interest groups to get involved in parliamentary
evaluation practice and this study considers the ties between MPs and groups to
investigate the following research question: What is the impact of interest groups on
MPs’ behavior related to evaluation requests? This question is not only relevant
from an empirical and theoretical point of view. It is also highly sensitive from a
normative stance. If interest groups do have a significant impact on the parliamen-
tary evaluation practice, then this could also have major implications for the dem-
ocratic accountability of policy processes and elected officials.
The article is structured as follows. The theoretical section introduces the
research hypotheses. The methodological section explains why the Swiss parlia-
ment is selected as a most likely case to test these hypotheses and shows that the
survey data collected are representative. It also presents the operationalization of
the main variables. The results section focuses on one major empirical finding:
MPs are more likely to demand policy evaluations in the policy domains of their
interest group affiliations. This effect holds even when controlling for a classical
measure of policy specialization such as legislative committee membership. Finally,
the concluding section puts this study into a broader perspective and identifies the
next research steps.
Theoretical framework
Both MPs and interest groups try to influence policy-making in order to realize the
policy preferences of their respective constituencies. However, major differences
between them are that interest groups do not compete for office, they cannot make
authoritative decisions and must cooperate with MPs in order to influence legis-
lative outputs. By contrast, MPs hold formal decision-making power, but regularly
interact with interest groups to increase their information resources and secure
their re-election. The MP–group linkage is frequently understood as an exchange
relationship. Groups provide technical expertise about the policy issue at stake and
political information about the policy position of their constituency to elected
MPs, or make contributions to their electoral campaign. As a counterpart, MPs
grant groups privileged access to an institutional venue (e.g. a hearing at a
Varone et al.
101
legislative committee) where policy decisions are made, or even commit themselves
to actively supporting legislative proposals promoted by groups (Berkhout, 2013).
Surveys of both interest groups (Rasmussen and Landeboom, 2013) and MPs
(Wonka, 2017) indicate that such partnerships are reported as crucial by both
sides. Previous scholarship has also demonstrated that the information transmitted
by groups to MPs predominantly concerns the feasibility and implementation of
policies (Baumgartner et al., 2009:132–33). Furthermore, when groups deliver
policy-relevant information, they target parties which share their ideological pref-
erences and policy positions. Linkages are established between like-minded groups
and MPs (Hall and Deardorff, 2006: 75): business groups predominantly support
the legislative activities of MPs belonging to right parties, while public interest
groups primarily help MPs from left parties to design workable policies (Gava
et al., 2017; Otjes and Rasmussen, 2017; Wonka, 2017). The present study con-
tributes to this literature by looking more deeply at the impact of MP–group links
on parliamentary evaluation practice. More concretely, we argue that interest
groups foster parliamentary evaluation demand.
Interest groups as catalysts
Beyond providing their own policy expertise and political intelligence to like-
minded MPs, interest groups...
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