United in fear: Interest group coalition formation as a weapon of the weak?
| Author | Andrea Pritoni,Marcel Hanegraaff |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116518824022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Union Politics
United in fear:
2019, Vol. 20(2) 198–218
! The Author(s) 2019
Interest group
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116518824022
coalition formation as a
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weapon of the weak?
Marcel Hanegraaff
Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Andrea Pritoni
Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of
Turin, Turin, Italy
Abstract
Although many interest groups work together perpetually, most academic studies
agree that coalition formation does not lead to more influence. In this article, we try
to explain these puzzling findings. While former research generally tends to frame
the decision of forming an interest group coalition as a strength, in this paper, we
argue that coalition building should be considered as a ‘weapon of the weak’.
Interest groups fearing that they are insufficiently influential, and whose very existence
as an organisation is at risk, are more likely to coalesce. This theoretical framework is
tested on a sample of around 3000 interest groups in six European countries – Belgium,
Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Sweden – and the European Union.
Empirical findings clearly demonstrate that perceived fears – oriented towards both
organisational survival and policy influence – have an effect on how likely it is that an
interest group will decide to build a coalition.
Keywords
Coalition formation, European Union, interest groups, lobbying
Corresponding author:
Andrea Pritoni, Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Lungo Dora Siena 100/A,
10153 Turin, Italy.
Email: andrea.pritoni@unito.it
Hanegraaff and Pritoni
199
Introduction
Interest groups in Western democracies are generally considered to be crucial
political actors: they socialise their members in democratic practices (Truman,
1951) and – very often – play a relevant role in policymaking (Schmitter, 1974).
Groups are important mediators between constituents and politicians (Dahl,
1961). On the one hand, groups monitor political decision-making between elec-
tions to make sure the interests of their constituents are dealt with adequately.
On the other hand, they channel the demands of citizens and of the business
community to the political arena in addition to more formal conduits, such
as elections.
Perhaps the most widespread tactic interest groups use to channel constituent
demands to the political arena is working together in coalitions (Beyers and De
Bruycker, 2017; Heaney and Lorenz, 2013; Hojnacki, 1997, 1998; Salisbury et al.,
1987; Schlozman and Tierney, 1986). By recurring to coalition formation, groups
are understood to pool (and, in turn, broaden) organisational resources (Hula,
1999) and political intelligence (Heaney, 2006), as well as to signal to policymakers
that a policy position has the support of a large and varied group of interests
(Mahoney, 2007, 2008; Nelson and Yackee, 2012). This should lead organisations
to increase their impact on political decision-making. Surprisingly, however, there
is hardly any evidence that lobbying coalitions actually help groups to exert influ-
ence on the policy process. Rather, most studies focusing on the effects of lobbying
coalitions on policy success find no effect, or even a negative effect, of coalition
formation on policy influence (Bunea, 2013; Haider-Markel, 2006; Mahoney and
Baumgartner, 2004).
This leads to a puzzling question: why is it that interest groups seek alliances, if
groups that work together do not have more impact on decision-making? Our
answer is that coalition building is a sign of weakness, not of strength. More
precisely, we contend that the decision to form an interest group coalition is a
response to external pressures: groups which perceive themselves as weaker than
other organisations, both in the political arena and in acquiring financial resources,
will increase cooperation. In reverse, groups which perceive themselves as stronger
than their allies or which have little fear for the survival of the organisation, have
fewer incentives to cooperate and therefore will be less inclined to actually coop-
erate with others. In this way, we innovatively conceive coalition formation as a
fall-back option for less powerful and more vulnerable interest groups to compen-
sate for their weak starting position; hence, it is not surprising that their impact on
policymaking remains slim. We thus conceptualise interest group coalition forma-
tion as a defensive rather than an offensive strategic option.
Next to our theoretical innovation, our analyses are also based on a new and
extensive dataset covering a broad range of interest group strategies, and coalition
formation in particular. We analyse a sample of around 3000 interest groups in six
European countries (Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovenia and
Sweden) and the European Union (EU) (Beyers et al., 2016), which is easily the
200
European Union Politics 20(2)
most comprehensive dataset on lobbying coalitions to date. This allows for a rig-
orous test of why interest groups form coalitions. More broadly, we contribute
to the scholarship on EU and comparative politics as the data highlight how
coalitions vary across countries and governance levels: in corporatist countries,
coalition building is more common than in pluralist countries, whereas the multi-
layered nature of political systems has little impact on these dynamics.
Coalition formation and influence
Politics is always about competition and compromises: all political actors and organ-
isations – political parties and their leaders, interest groups, social movements, and
also countries and international organisations in international relations – either
compete by advocating different political views or reach compromises between
more or less common policy preferences. In doing so, political actors often recur
to coalitions: indeed, it is quite uncommon that the two sides of any potential
political issue are advocated by one lone political actor.
The literature concerning why interest groups form alliances is relatively under-
developed, but a substantial literature has emerged during the past decades
(Heaney, 2006; Heaney and Lorenz, 2013; Hojnacki, 1997, 1998; Holyoke, 2009;
Mahoney, 2007, 2008). Most of these studies set out to analyse how cooperation is
used as a political strategy in order to increase the impact groups might have in the
political arena. Nelson and Yackee (2012: 339), for example, argue that ‘[. . .] inter-
est groups rank coalition participation among their top influence tactics’; similarly,
Heaney (2004: 258) states that ‘[. . .] lobbying in coalitions [. . .] is perceived to help
determine the shape of public policy’ and ‘[. . .] working together in coalition is one
of the most common tactics that groups use in attempting to influence policy’
(Heany and Lorenz, 2013: 252).
It is therefore no surprise that studies on coalition formation try to find out
whether, and how, coalition formation is related to influence. This comes in two
flavours. First, as influence is notoriously hard to measure, some have analysed
whether traditionally ‘stronger’ interest organisations engage more in coalition
lobbying as a proxy for influence. The results, however, surprisingly suggest that
traditionally ‘weaker organisations’ coalesce more than groups which we tend to
perceive as ‘stronger’. For instance, several studies have analysed whether business
groups – as the more powerful political actors – or nongovernmental organisations
(NGOs) are more likely to form coalitions. The majority of these studies find that
NGOs coalesce more often (Beyers and De Bruycker, 2017: 6; Clark and Wilson,
1961: 162; Jenkins-Smith et al., 1991; Klu¨ver, 2013; Salisbury, 1990), while only
one study finds that business groups form coalitions more often (Hojnacki, 1997:
70). In line with this, coalitions are more often found to be used by resource-poor
organisations (Beyers and De Bruycker, 2017; Holyoke, 2009; Junk, 2017) than by
more resource-rich groups (Sorurbakhsh, 2016). In short, while these studies do
not use a direct measure for influence, there is a strong suggestion in this literature
that coalition formation is not used by the most powerful actors.
Hanegraaff and Pritoni
201
Group characteristics are not always very accurate proxies for influence. For
this reason, other studies have linked coalition strategies to actual policy influence.
The results are, nonetheless, quite consistent with those presented above. That is,
few studies see some positive effects of coalition formation, yet most see no effect,
or a negative effect, of coalition formation on policy success (Junk, 2017). On the
‘positive side’, Nelson and Yackee (2012) show that coalition participants
have more success when there is consensus across the messages sent from the
coalition and where coalitions are larger. However, Heinz et al. (1993: 346) find
no relationship between the size of interest coalitions and the success of influencing
policy proposals in the United States, and similar (null) results have been presented
by Bunea (2013), Haider-Markel (2006), Junk (2017) and Mahoney and
Baumgartner (2004).
All this leads to a puzzling question: why do so many interest groups still work
together, if doing so does not seem to increase their political influence (Gray and
Lowery, 1998: 11)? We suspect that cooperation to influence public policy is not
initiated out of strength, but out of weakness. Moreover, we argue...
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