Invited mobilization? Interest organizations, experts, and lawmaking in the German parliament

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Rainer Eising
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455517215

The project shall study the impact of interest groups on laws through their lobbying in committee hearings of the German Bundestag. It seeks to answer the questions which interest groups are represented in parliament and which interest groups get what in German federal legislation. The basic conjecture of this project is: The information provided by interest organizations and experts in parliamentary committee hearings has an impact on the content of government bills.To address the research gaps, controversies, and ambiguities associated with this research subject, the project will study legislative lobbying on 50 goverment bills submitted in 2019/20. Conceiving of interest groups as rational actors and studying their resource exchanges with policy-makers in the parliamentary arena, it builds on the three theoretical building blocks of the research unit. It connects them to insights derived in the study of parliamentary committees that has developed three major perspectives on committee work: the informational, the distributive, and the partisan perspective. The project will study the impact of interest groups on federal laws in three ways: (1) It will establish the success of interest groups in terms of their attainment of preferences. (2) It will measure the amount of bill changes in parliament through the DocuToads (Document Transpose Or ADD, Delete, Substitute) algorithm. (3) It will analyse the association of interest group mobilization and positions with the compliance costs of bills. To obtain insights into the relevance of hearings, interest groups, experts, the parliamentary parties' policy spokespersons and their leaders for the passage of a bill, the project will code information that is publicly available in the German Bundestag's information system DIP (Dokumentations- und Informationssystem für Parlamentarische Vorgänge) and on its committees' websites. It will also rely on semi-standardised interviews with the parliamentary parties' spokespersons who were put in charge of handling the fifty bills. In sum, the project shall enhance our knowledge about legislative lobbying in parliament, link interest group studies closer to other political science areas, and contribute to building a data infrastructure on legislative lobbying in Germany.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada, Sweden
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. James Cross; Dr. Henrik Hermansson