Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance: Populations, Strategies, and Political Opportunity Structures [1st ed. 2023] 3031278631, 9783031278631

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Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance Populations, Strategies, and Political Opportunity Structures Edited by

l i s a m . de l l m u t h e l i z a be t h a . bl o od g o od

Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance

Lisa M. Dellmuth Elizabeth A. Bloodgood Editors

Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance Populations, Strategies, and Political Opportunity Structures

Editors Lisa M. Dellmuth Department of Economic History and International Relations Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

Elizabeth A. Bloodgood Department of Political Science Concordia University Montreal, QC, Canada

ISBN 978-3-031-27863-1    ISBN 978-3-031-27864-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Original articles published in the journal Interest Groups and Advocacy, 2019, 2023 Spin-off from Interest Groups and Advocacy, ‘Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance: Populations, Strategies, and Political Opportunity Structures’, Volume 8, Issue 3, 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface and Acknowledgments

Advocacy groups are proliferating in global governance and are crucially shaping the procedures, performance, and justice in the governance of transboundary policy challenges. Whether global governance institutions, such as the African Union, World Trade Organization, or the United Nations, can help states solve pressing transboundary policy challenges in part depends on how advocacy groups lobby for procedural and policy change. Failure to adequately address such challenges can have severe repercussions on people’s livelihoods due to climate change, financial crises, food insecurity, pandemics, and more. Several important questions arise from this research problem: How, why, and under which conditions do advocacy groups shape global governance? This edited volume tackles these questions with the aspiration to contribute to an enhanced understanding of advocacy group effects in global governance. Its twelve chapters address these questions through the lens of a unified theoretical framework privileging the role of political opportunity structures in shaping the effects of advocacy groups on agenda-setting, rule-making, and policy implementation by global governance institutions. This edited volume has been previously published as a special issue in the peer-reviewed Interest Groups & Advocacy in vol. 3 (2019) under the title “Special Issue: Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance: Populations, Strategies, and Political Opportunity Structures.” The editors have taken the opportunity of this reprint to update the introductory chapter and to add a new concluding chapter, which summarizes the research results from the chapters and discusses the broader implications v

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for research on international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and interest groups going global. The volume reports research results from a large number of research projects from around the world. These research projects span Comparative Politics and International Relations (IR) and have in common the ambition to better understand the effects of advocacy groups in global governance. This edited volume joins these various research efforts together in one coherent research effort. The articles and then chapters were first presented and discussed in a researcher and practitioner conference held on June 10–11, 2018, in Stockholm, Sweden, as a collaboration between Concordia University (Canada), Stockholm University (Sweden), and the Stockholm School of Economics. We extend special gratitude to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the generous funding of this research initiation conference (F17-1189:1), which brought together a group of twenty-two participants from both academic research and civil society to discuss research articles on how knowledge on advocacy groups effects in global governance could be advanced. Some of these research articles are included as chapters in this volume. For readers who want to replicate the research results in this edited volume, the researchers make their data available at their personal homepages. We also have been fortunate to benefit from the generous comments by Clifford Bob, André Boustany, Karl Hallding, Naama Lutz, Carl Vikberg, Axel Wenblad, and Helen Yanacopulos. We are also immensely grateful to Darren Halpin and Beth Leech, who were editors of Interest Groups & Advocacy and who provided helpful and encouraging advice throughout the publication process, and to Stewart Beale at Palgrave Macmillan who guided us professionally through the publication process of the edited volume. We are also grateful to the reviewers of our special issue who challenged us with candid and constructive comments on how to improve the individual chapters. For research assistance, we extend our thanks to Ana-­ Sofia Valderas and Tristan Masson, who helped to organize the 2018 conference and to prepare the special issue for submission. Stockholm, Sweden Montreal, QC, Canada 

Lisa M. Dellmuth Elizabeth A. Bloodgood

Contents

Introduction   1 1 Advocacy  Group Effects in Global Governance: A Theoretical Framework  3 Lisa M. Dellmuth and Elizabeth A. Bloodgood 2 Close  Cousins or False Friends? Studying Interest Groups and INGOs 29 Darren R. Halpin Part I Populations and Participation  41 3 No  Borders, No Bias? Comparing Advocacy Group Populations at the National and Transnational Levels 43 Joost Berkhout and Marcel Hanegraaff 4 NGO  Participation in Global Governance Institutions: International and Domestic Drivers of Engagement 71 Laura A. Henry, Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, Carla Winston, and Priya Bala-Miller

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Contents

5 Competition  and Strategic Differentiation Among Transnational Advocacy Groups121 Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni Part II Strategies and Opportunities 163 6 Lobbying  the Lobbyists: When and Why Do Policymakers Seek to Influence Advocacy Groups in Global Governance?165 Kirsten Lucas, Marcel Hanegraaff, and Iskander De Bruycker 7 The  Stakes of Global Venue Shopping: Examining Bank Lobbying in the Basel Committee and the European Union197 Adam William Chalmers and Adela Alexandra Iacobov 8 When  Do Refugees Matter? The Importance of Issue Salience for Digital Advocacy Organizations229 Nina Hall Part III GGI Policy-making and Implementation 257 9 Transnational  Partnerships’ Strategies in Global Fisheries Governance259 Matilda Tove Petersson 10 Taking  Control of Regulations: How International Advocacy NGOs Shape the Regulatory Environments of Their Target Countries283 Andrew Heiss 11 Civil  Society and Global Governance: Exploring Transscalar Connections309 Jan Aart Scholte

 Contents 

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Conclusion 321 12 Advocacy  Group Effects in Global Governance: A Research Agenda323 Elizabeth A. Bloodgood and Lisa M. Dellmuth Index

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List of Contributors

Priya Bala-Miller  School of Business, Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada Joost  Berkhout Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Elizabeth  A.  Bloodgood  Department of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada Adam  William  Chalmers School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Iskander De Bruycker  University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium Lisa M. Dellmuth  Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Mette  Eilstrup-Sangiovanni  Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Nina  Hall  Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy Darren  R.  Halpin School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia Marcel  Hanegraaff Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Heiss  Department of Public Management and Policy, Andrew Young School of Public Policy, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA Laura  A.  Henry Department of Government and Legal Studies, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA Adela Alexandra Iacobov  GlobalFocus Centre, London, UK Kirsten Lucas  Policy and Operations Evaluation Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague, The Netherlands Matilda  Tove  Petersson Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Jan  Aart  Scholte Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom  Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Carla  Winston School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

Abbreviations

BCBS BRICS CITES

Basel Committee on Banking Supervision Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora COP Conference of Parties CP Comparative politics CS Civil society CSO Civil society organization EU European Union FiA Fish-i-Africa FiTI Fisheries Transparency Initiative GGI Global governance institutions GIS Geographic Information Systems GPS Global Positioning Systems GUO Global ultimate owner ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers IGO Intergovernmental organization ILO International Labor Organization IMO International Maritime Organization INGO International non-governmental organization IPOA-IUU International Plan of Action to Protect, Deter, and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing IR International relations IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature IUU Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing NCA National Constituent Assembly NGO Non-governmental organization xiii

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Abbreviations

PSMA POS PPP RFB RFMOs TAG UNDOC UNFCCC UNGC V-Dem WTO WWG

Port State Measures Agreement Political opportunity structures Public-private partnerships Regional fishery bodies Regional fisheries management organizations Transnational advocacy groups United Nations Office for Drug and Crime United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change United Nations Global Compact Varieties of Democracy World Trade Organization World Wildlife Fund for Nature

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 8.1

Predicted business bias per level 62 Total NGO participation in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential81 Numbers and proportions of NGOs participating in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential and country income 82 Numbers and proportions of NGOs participating in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential and political regime 83 Numbers and proportions of NGOs participating in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential and civil society environment84 Population of environmental transnational advocacy groups, 1950–2018137 Frequency using amplification and persuasion 177 Predicted probability plots for amplification (left) and persuasion (right), by levels of salience 180 Predicted probability plots for amplification (left) and persuasion (right), by levels of democratic accountability 181 Predicted probability plots for amplification (left) and persuasion (right), by types of policymakers 182 Marginal effects of the three dimensions of international scope on global venue shopping 212 Box and whisker plot of banks’ international scope 225 Marginal effects of international scope on global venue shopping for EU banks lobbying the EU only 225 Marginal effects of international scope on global venue shopping for BCBS banks lobbying the BCBS only 226 Source: European Commission (2018, p. 5) 251 xv

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List of Figures

Fig. 8.2 Source: European Commission (2018, p. 9) 251 Fig. 8.3 Source: Gallup poll (Newport 2018) 252 Fig. 10.1 Relationship between institutional constraints, resource configurations, programmatic flexibility, and advocacy effects 287 Fig. 10.2 Article 19’s income, expenditures, and full-time staff, 2004–2015291 Fig. 10.3 Article 19’s headquarters and regional offices 292 Fig. 10.4 AMERA’s income, expenditures, and full-time staff, 2004–2015299 Fig. 10.5 AMERA’s offices and primary partners 300

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4

Commensurability of labels 34 Number of associations by country/region 54 Distribution of advocacy groups by policy domain and governance level 56 Proportion of business groups per policy domain and governance level 57 OLS regression estimates of the proportion of business interests per policy field 59 Regression results for NGO participation by country in the UNGC and UNFCCC 87 Bold rows are those used in models which appear only in the appendix100 Comparisons of different measures of democracy 110 WGI Rule of Law 111 Different V-Dem CS measures 112 Overseas development aid 113 What counts as a CSO? 114 Strategic profiles of transnational advocacy groups 127 Global population of environmental conservation TAGs (1895–2018) (by founding year) 140 Distribution of strategies by group size 150 Distribution of strategic profiles by group size 151 Overview of variables used 176 Distribution information exchanges between advocacy groups and policymakers, by content and type 178 Why do policymakers use amplification or persuasion? 179 Issues discussed at the UNFCCC COPs 188 xvii

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List of Tables

Table 6.5 Table 7.1

Issues discussed at the WTO MCs 188 Multinomial logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping 210 Table 7.2 Multinomial logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping using BCBS member general 215 Table 7.3 Multinomial logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping using GUO data216 Table 7.4 Logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping 217 Table 7.5 Summary statistics 217 Table 7.6 List of questions used from the global indicators of regulatory governance data 218 Table 7.7 List of banks 219 Table 7.8 Test for multicollinearity 224 Table 8.1 Digital advocacy organizations (in chronological order from the date of founding) 235 Table 8.2 Summarizing refugee campaigns 247 Table 9.1 Transnational partnerships characteristics 268 Table 9.2 Strategies of transnational partnerships 271 Table 10.1 Resource configurations and institutional constraints 286

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance: A Theoretical Framework Lisa M. Dellmuth and Elizabeth A. Bloodgood

Biodiversity losses, epidemics, financial crises, hunger, illegal fishing, migration, and violent conflict are only a few examples of the complex and trans-boundary policy challenges that states are facing in today’s interconnected world. To address such challenges, states have over the past three decades delegated increasing power to global governance institutions (GGIs), traditionally referring to multilateral institutions, which have treaty-based bodies and member states. Global governance is no longer solely a matter of state cooperation or bureaucratic politics, as GGIs nowadays also encompass private and hybrid governance arrangements (Abbott et al. 2016; Bartley 2018; Pevehouse et al. 2020). Global governance has seen substantially enlarged authority in recent years (Hooghe et al. 2017).

L. M. Dellmuth (*) Department of Economic History and International Relations, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] E. A. Bloodgood Department of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. M. Dellmuth, E. A. Bloodgood (eds.), Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8_1

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Given their increased authority, GGIs are an attractive target of advocacy groups. Since the end of the cold war, advocacy groups have proliferated and enjoyed increasing access to global governance institutions such as the European Union, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations (UN) climate conferences (Bloodgood 2010; Reimann 2006; Tallberg et al. 2013). As of 2022, 6110 international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) have consultative status in the UN (NGO Branch 2022); close to 8000 INGOs are now listed in the interest group register of the EU (2018); and hundreds of INGOs attend the ministerial meetings and conferences of the WTO (Hanegraaff et al. 2016), regional fisheries management organizations (Petersson et al. 2018), and World Bank (World Bank 2018). The UN climate change conferences have seen a particular increase in advocacy group involvement in recent years; from the first UN Conference of the Parties (COP) in 1994 to COP26 in 2021, the number of accredited non-state actors has grown to 3047 (UNFCCC 2022). These observations beg the crucial questions of how, why, and under which conditions do advocacy groups shape global governance? These questions are central to our understanding of whether advocacy groups enhance or undermine global governance. In the eyes of many, advocacy group involvement improves representation and lends heft to transnational public goals such as justice and climate change mitigation (Steffek 2013; Allan and Hadden 2017; Lövbrand et al. 2017; Dörfler and Heinzel 2023). In the eyes of others, advocacy groups tend to exacerbate interest group capture (Hanegraaff, 2015; Nasiritousi, 2017) and can undermine global-scale collaboration and its outcomes (Agné 2016;  Chalmers 2014; Chan et al. 2022; Bakaki and Bernauer 2017). This debate is far from settled, and we require a more systematic understanding of the effects of advocacy groups in global governance. Knowledge on advocacy group effects in global governance is rich empirically, but there is much room for theoretical innovation. Existing studies of advocacy groups in global governance are chiefly located in the study of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in global governance, but there is also a largely separate literature on interest groups. Studies combining both theoretical traditions are limited in number. We therefore have little systematic knowledge of possible advocacy effects in GGIs and their patterns and drivers. We know advocacy groups to play an important role in information provision (Chalmers 2013; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017), policy innovation (Heiss and Johnson 2016; Steffek 2013), and implementation and enforcement (Avant 2004; Bush 2015).

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However, no previous research has rigorously examined at book length how advocacy groups affect global advocacy group populations, group strategies, and GGI policymaking as well as implementation. This edited volume seeks to address this limitation in earlier research and increase our understanding of the aims, strategies, and effects of advocacy groups on global governance. We conceptualize advocacy groups as non-profit or profit interest organizations that may pursue domestic or global strategies, or adopt a mix of domestic and global strategies, to achieve their goals. We thus focus on advocacy with the aim not only to affect government policy (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Berry, 1977; Truman, 1951) but also to influence the public good more generally (Skjelsbaek 1971; Feld 1972; Stroup 2012). Indeed, INGOs do often but not always seek to influence public policy, but still have political aims (Hadden 2015; Heiss and Johnson 2016; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017; Stroup and Wong 2017). At the heart of global governance, we have the ruling institutions— GGIs. GGIs are public, private, or hybrid organizations. Examples are intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the EU and WTO, standard setting bodies, such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and International Standards Organization, and multi-stakeholder institutions, such as the Forest Stewardship Council, UN Sustainable Development Goals, and private governance institutions, such as the Marine Stewardship Council and the International Council on Metals and Mining. Those organizations are embedded in global governance more broadly, which refers to the complex of processes, structures, and institutions on a planetary scale that shape distribution and regulation of public resources (Weiss and Wilkinson, 2019). By examining advocacy effects on GGIs systematically, this volume makes two principal contributions. First, theoretically, we develop a theoretical framework to understand the conditions under which advocacy groups, constrained or enabled by domestic and global political opportunity structures, can affect GGIs. We focus on three aspects of GGIs that advocacy groups might affect: (1) global advocacy group populations and their participation in GGIs; (2) strategies and opportunities of advocacy groups in GGIs; and (3) GGI policymaking and implementation. Global advocacy group populations encompass all groups active in relation to GGI. Strategies are defined as intentional behavior with the aim to advocate for a specific policy solution. Policymaking encompasses both agenda-­ setting and rule-making, whereas policy implementation refers to the

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domestic and global application and enforcement of global policy. Our focus on political opportunity structures is anchored in both INGO (Henry and Sundstrom 2022; Pallas and Bloodgood 2022) and interest group research (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Beyers 2004; Hojnacki et  al. 2012) while still advancing the theoretical frontier on advocacy effects on global governance. Second, empirically, the chapters rigorously  explore the theoretical framework in different global governance contexts, thereby providing the most comprehensive analysis so far of advocacy effects on GGIs. Through ambitious research designs in multiple policy areas, including development, diplomacy, environmental governance, economic governance, internet governance, and social justice, articles engage with their research questions by examining advocacy group politics across global institutions, levels of government, types of advocacy organizations, issue areas, and over time. The concluding chapter of the volume summarizes and discusses our contribution in light of the nature of interest representation beyond the nation-state and the implications of special interest advocacy effects for the quality of global governance. We close by sketching avenues for future research.

Limitations in Earlier Research To date, interest group and INGO research have made only sporadic contact, despite a strong potential for highly productive cross-fertilization. This section examines differences in these two literatures in order to identify several missed opportunities. Theories of Interest Groups and INGOs In terms of the goals of advocacy groups, interest groups are defined as formally organized groups outside of the government system yet seeking to exert influence on the function or composition of government and its outputs (e.g., Beyers et  al. 2008; Berry and Wilcox 2005, p.  5; Baroni et al. 2014). In contrast, INGO are internationally-oriented NGOs even if they are not necessarily international in the scope of their operations, and are typically defined as voluntarily organized actors acting in the interest of public benefit (e.g., Skjelsbaek 1971; Feld 1972; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Martens 2002; Heiss and Johnson 2016). The category INGO is generally not seen to include industry or business groups or labor unions

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(Martens 2002; Stroup and Wong 2017), while these are fair game to be viewed as interest groups (Baroni et al. 2014; Bouwen, Bouwen 2002). Some INGOs are organizations that only provide services (Murdie and Davis 2012), while definitions of interest groups generally require explicitly political behavior (Beyers et  al. 2008). However, recent years have seen increasing recognition of INGOs’ advocacy orientation, practical motivations, and organizational imperatives for survival (e.g., Cooley and Ron 2002; Sell and Prakash 2004; Bob 2005; Bloodgood 2010; Prakash and Gugerty 2010; Mitchell and Schmitz 2014; Stroup and Wong 2017; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017; Tallberg et al. 2018). With respect to strategies, INGOs are traditionally seen as limited in their behavior by their lack of economic or coercive power to the use of strategies of normative pressure and information monitoring intended to shift state behavior via issue framing, agenda-setting, and norm diffusion (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Brysk 2002; Clark 2001; Risse et al. 2015; Heiss and Johnson 2016; Stroup and Wong 2017). By contrast, interest group scholars typically focus on different types of inside and outside strategies of lobbying according to whichever is perceived most effective at putting pressure on government actors to shift their policy (Kollman 1998; Chalmers 2013; Binderkrantz et al. 2015; Hanegraaff et al. 2016; Dür and Mateo 2013). Moreover, INGO and interest group scholars expect their respective organizations to exert effects on policy and practice at different phases of the policymaking cycle. INGO scholarship tends to focus on the earliest and latest stages of the process, namely agenda-setting and monitoring compliance (Carpenter 2007; Hendrix and Wong 2012; Risse 2012). Interest group scholars have examined the full range from agenda-setting to enforcement, but tend to concentrate on specific phases of the process in which lobbying is most present (decision-making itself) (Halpin 2002; Lowery et al. 2008; Hanegraaff et al. 2016). Last, the extent to which advocacy groups are expected to adapt their strategies based on political opportunity structures varies significantly. Institutional context is crucial within the interest group literature, as the choice between inside versus outside lobbying depends on the interaction between institutions in which the organization finds itself, and thus its access and available strategies (Mahoney and Baumgartner 2008; Hanegraaff et  al. 2016; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). INGO research tends to focus on the ability of organizations to shape preferences according to norms internalized into individual and government practice

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(Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 2015) in which compliance is largely voluntary (according to self-interest or a sense of appropriate behavior) to standards set by non-state and state actors together (Green and Auld 2016; Prakash and Potoski 2014). The INGO literature has traditionally assumed a confrontational relationship between INGOs and states (Stroup and Wong 2017) and thus the institutional context in which INGOs operate is typically seen as thinner and less important (Heiss and Johnson 2016). This is largely due to the prominence of the boomerang model within INGO research, as INGOs can use their networks to boomerang around institutional obstacles (Clark 1995; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Florini 2000; Brysk 2002; Risse et al. 2015). Missed Opportunities for Theoretical Exchange The gaps between the interest group and INGO literatures have resulted in several missed opportunities for theoretical and empirical advancements that this special issue seeks to exploit. Here we outline how the theories could inform each other. In the ensuing section, we will develop ideas for the conditions under which advocacy groups’ effects on GGIs occur by drawing on the exchange between these literatures. First, interest group theories can benefit from INGO scholars work on governance beyond the state (c.f. Avant et  al. 2010; Scholte 2017). In particular, venue-shopping theory could be developed by greater engagement with literatures in international relations (IR) on polycentric governance and regime complexity. States often take a backseat in polycentric regimes and benefit from advocacy groups who provide information and policy ideas (Scholte 2017), while institutional complexity provides interest groups with a greater variety of strategies in the design of their advocacy campaigns (Brysk 1993; Keohane and Victor 2011; Green and Auld 2016; Allan and Hadden 2017). Overlapping regimes create the potential for new issue linkages that may enable a new range of bargaining solutions (Davis 2004), fragmented governance architectures open up new modes of policy contestation (Zelli 2011; Orsini 2013) and bring together interesting new coalitions and partnerships of advocacy groups (Yanacopulos 2005; Chalmers 2013; Beyers et  al. 2017; Sundstrom & Henry 2017; Pallas & Uhlin 2014). Thus, not only are the available options for venue shopping greater when global polycentric arenas for policymaking are explored (Pralle 2006; Joachim 2007; Chalmers 2013), but also political

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contestation, state interests, political opportunity structures, and thus the nature of advocacy group strategies and influence are likely to differ. Second, the inclusion of theories from INGO scholarship introduces a broader set of strategies that advocacy groups might adopt, in particular alternative forms of outside advocacy such as networking, mass demonstration, protest actions, and litigation (c.f. Dalton 1994; Betsill and Corell 2008; Murdie and Davis 2012). Advocacy groups pursuing global strategies have different constellations of interests that may enable new types of and broader coalitions for successfully applying pressure in national and global arenas, which are often overlooked by interest group scholars (Carpenter 2007, 2011; Busby 2007; Bob 2012; Hadden 2015). Larger networks of advocacy groups may be able to apply pressure to multiple national and GGI decision-makers simultaneously across venues and issue frames for greater effect. While inside strategies are similar across the interest group and INGO literature, INGO scholarship delves more deeply into the alternatives that organizations pursue when direct access to decision-­making processes is blocked, including “naming and shaming” campaigns and dramatic protests and mass demonstrations (Hadden and Jasny 2017; Hendrix and Wong 2012; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Bob 2005). In turn, we identify two main ways in which INGO theories can learn by drawing on interest group theories. First, by acknowledging the importance of institutions in shaping advocacy group activities and effects, INGO scholars could better understand how global advocacy group populations mobilize and impact global governance. While INGO research incorporates insights from theories of gatekeeping (Busby 2007; Carpenter 2011), there is much to be done. INGOs may “boomerang” in the international system to work around obstacles, but they also need to respond to institutional opportunities and constraints when they select where to engage with institutions (Bloodgood and Clough 2017). Horizontal and vertical venue-shopping theories from interest group studies help to sharpen expectations for the conditions under which organizations will seek to influence policy in global, regional, or national institutions, and when organizations will select between alternative GGIs for more favorable conditions according to issue position, ideology, or formal access rules (Bolleyer and Börzel 2010; Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Stroup and Murdie 2012). Second, interest group theory on how institutions may shape advocacy group access, group influence, and the resources needed by policymakers (cf. Dür and de Bièvre 2007), could be fruitfully further developed in the

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global context. The global context has features that are different from domestic politics, which open up a space for novel theorizing. Examples are the absence of a global public sphere, lower salience of policymaking, overlapping and polycentric institutions, and a broader range of actor types and levels of governance involved in policymaking.  For instance, exchange theory of interest group influence, with its focus on the conditions under which different types of information enable interest groups access to decision-making institutions and processes, has been advanced in the context of global governance (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017; Tallberg et al. 2013; Bloodgood 2010). In an ever more interconnected and globalized world, it is important to revisit classical interest group theory.

Theoretical Framework Building on the above identified areas that promise fruitful cross-­ fertilization between interest group and INGO theory, the central argument of this edited volume is that domestic and global political opportunity structures enable and constrain the effects of advocacy groups on GGIs in terms of global advocacy group populations and their participation in GGIs, strategies and opportunities in GGIs, and GGIs policymaking as well as policy implementation both at the domestic and global level. Political opportunity structures, originating from social movement research are widely used to understand the roles of INGO in global governance. Opportunity structures refer to specific institutional arrangements, resource configurations, and policy environments that may shape advocacy group mobilization, strategies, and effects (e.g., Tarrow 2005; Skodvin and Andresen 2008; Gugerty and Prakash, 2010; Hadden and Jasny 2017). Putting opportunity structures center-stage allows for theorizing the conditions under which advocacy groups mobilize, target GGIs (and the GGIs they target), and shape GGIs’ political outcomes. Further, we will develop our understanding of these conditions in the three categories of opportunity structures: institutional arrangements, resource configurations, and policy environments. Institutional arrangements: It is common for institutional explanations to assume that rules, norms, and procedures enabling advocacy group involvement in governance structure advocacy group effects (e.g., March and Olsen 1984; Dür and de Bièvre 2007). At the domestic level, democracy is an important factor shaping advocacy group mobilization globally

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(Smith and Wiest 2005; Lee 2010). Advocacy group populations are likely to be larger from democratic countries given higher levels of political openness and less repression of civil society (Stroup 2012; Heiss and Johnson 2016). Indeed, advocacy groups from democratic countries are more likely to engage in inside lobbying since they may have access to policymakers at national and global levels (Hanegraaff et  al. 2016). However, it is debated whether increased access to GGI policymakers leads to influence at global venues, as there may be less need for information from these groups and more noise given all of the groups participating in a democratic context (Lohmann 1998; Tallberg et al. 2018). Added advocacy group participation from authoritarian countries may provide new meaningful information given the relative difficulty and risk of participation in nondemocratic contexts (Bernauer et  al. 2014; Heiss and Johnson 2016). Thus, while advocacy groups from democratic countries are more likely to engage in inside lobbying in GGIs, their lobbying strategies may not be as effective. Furthermore, democracy in GGIs conceptualized as relatively generous access rules does not necessarily imply that advocacy groups have more influence on political outcomes. One reason may be that GGIs with generous access rules see participation by a larger number and variety of advocacy groups, which may increase the potential for countervailing lobbying (Austen-Smith and Wright 1994; Baumgartner and Leech 1998). In addition, GGIs with more access may also require larger winning coalitions to effect policy change (Evangelista 1999; Risse-Kappen 1995). GGIs having more restrictive access rules may lead to participation by smaller and more homogenous populations of advocacy groups and face fewer veto points and therefore have greater effects on political outcomes (cf. Bernauer et al. 2014). In light of these considerations, we expect GGIs with more generous access rules to lead to greater participation by more and more diverse advocacy groups populations, but it remains an empirical question whether this strengthens or weakens group effects on GGI policy or behavior. Resource configurations: There is evidence that advocacy groups are more likely to participate in global policymaking if they are relatively well-­ endowed in terms of resources (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). While national economic factors, most notably level of economic development, can impact the level of available resources for advocacy groups, the relationship is rarely a direct or linear one. National institutions, including tax and lobbying laws, have differential effects on the resources available to

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specific types of advocacy groups (Bloodgood et al., 2014). In addition, selective government funding is an important source of advocacy group mobilization (Dür and Mateo 2013; Beyers et al. 2008; Bloodgood and Tremblay-Boire 2017). Resources, in turn, may allow for group effects in global governance due to structural power (Bernhagen and Bräuninger 2005), personnel and finances (McCarthy and Zald 1978), information (Lohmann 1998; Bouwen 2002; Tallberg et al. 2018), and group leadership (Halpin and Jordan 2009). We expect greater availability of resources for an advocacy group to be positively related to that group’s effects on GGIs. Coalition-building may also increase advocacy group effects on policymaking and implementation by combining forces to compensate for individual weaknesses (Betsill and Corell 2008; Klüver 2011; Lindgren and Persson 2011). Coalitions might include different types of advocacy groups, including business or industry associations, charitable or public benefit organizations, or civil society organizations, and might include organizations with different preferences around different aspects of the issue at hand (Lowi 1964; Dür and de Bièvre 2007). The central expectation is that advocacy groups may have greater effects when seeking to influence issues where they represent homogenous interests and where there are few counter-lobbies. Networking, or the existence of powerful gatekeeping organizations, may allow organizations to bridge their differences and encourage the adoption of common frames, producing more homogenous and focused issue campaigns (Busby 2007; Carpenter 2007, 2011; Allan and Hadden 2017). The nature of the policy may assist or stymie coalition-building. While regulatory policy may produce both dedicated advocates and opponents, distributive policy is likely to generate concentrated constituencies with a positive stake in the policy, making advocacy group effects more likely, but redistributive policy can be expected to produce both diffuse costs and diffuse benefits, making interest group mobilization and effects less likely. Policy environment: We focus on two aspects of policy environments that interest group theory has shown to matter for group effects: complexity and salience. Complexity refers both to the extent to which a policy problem is difficult to analyze, understand, and solve, and the number of multilateral institutions relevant to the operation of the policy area (Keohane and Victor 2011; Morse and Keohane 2014). The complexity of an issue increases according to the number of distinct actors involved (public agencies, types of private actors, and policymaking domains); the

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extent to which technical knowledge is needed to diagnose or solve the problem; and the fragmentation of the institutional context or regime. The greater the complexity of a policy problem, the more likely it is that international policymakers will lack sufficient information, and the greater the probability that they will rely on information provided by advocacy groups (McNamara 1999; Tallberg et  al. 2018). However, with more complexity and nuance, and higher degrees of overlap across relevant international regimes and GGIs, there is also more space for advocacy groups to pursue advocacy. For example, new coalitions may arise that are built on different aspects of an issue and that may work against each other (Hadden 2015; Allan and Hadden 2017). This logic suggests that the more complex the institutional landscape, and thus the larger the number of GGIs dealing with the issue, the more likely advocacy groups are to create large, heterogeneous coalitions with shared interests and the greater the number of possible GGIs to target with their advocacy. This should lead to greater advocacy group effects. Salience may be understood in three different ways: salience to states, advocacy groups, and the general public. While the different uses of salience in previous literature make it difficult to develop a consistent theoretical expectation, several lines of reasoning are discernible. If a policy is highly salient to member states, then they are less likely to take the interests and concerns of advocacy groups into consideration, as compared to when they care less about the policy issue. This logic is often stated in terms of market failures: INGOs as non-state, non-market actors are expected to fill in the gaps in state and market activity, providing services, including interest representation, where states and markets are not interested or able (Prakash and Gugerty 2010). Others, however, have argued that advocacy groups serve as service bureaus and thus advocacy groups follow where states lead, essentially making their effects epiphenomenal (Skjelsbaek 1971; Mearsheimer 1994; Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Raustiala 1997). Interest group populations, according to these scholars, are expected to be the most active in areas where states are active. Indeed, on more salient issues, there are more likely to be advocacy groups active on different sides of the issue. Yet others have argued that in the eyes of stakeholder organizations, GGIs are more democratic in terms of deliberation, representation, and accountability, the more states care about a specific policy issue, contradicting a widespread suspicion that democracy is something that states “can afford” when real interests are not at stake (Agné et al. 2015).

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In terms of issue salience to citizens, an issue enjoying high salience among states may be of limited interest to specific citizen groups. Interest groups, in turn, have been shown to also play a key role in shaping the public salience of issues (Dür and Mateo 2013). In turn, issue salience to advocacy groups increases the influence of groups that form part of the relatively large lobbying coalition on the issue and decreases the influence of groups that belong to the relatively small coalition (Klüver 2011; see Beyers et al. 2017 for an overview). These bodies of literature each generate different expectations with regard to how issue salience may shape interest group strategies and their effects. It is possible that the more salient a policy issue, the larger the global population of interest groups active in that issue. But, the expected positive relationship between issue salience and advocacy group effects on GGI policymaking and implementation may be weakened when issue salience generates effective counter-lobbying. Taken together, we argue that the advocacy group effects on GGIs are best understood by examining how groups use and shape domestic and global political opportunity structures.

Findings and Implications The chapters in this volume use data from a broad and diverse set of samples of global advocacy group populations, covering multiple GGIs, multiple countries, and multiple issue areas. In terms of GGIs, the chapters focus on multilateral institutions such as the UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change and the Food and Agriculture Organization, but also hybrid governance arrangements such as the regime around the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. In terms of countries, the chapters cover a broad range of countries from the Global North and the Global South, including the BRICS. In terms of issue areas, some chapters focus on single areas such as banking, digital governance, and environmental affairs, whereas others adopt a comparative design. Based on this rich evidence, this book yields three main findings. Each finding pertains to one of the three core themes of the book: populations and participation, strategies and opportunities, and GGI policy and implementation.

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First, several authors find that business interests are better represented in policymaking than civil society interests at both domestic and global levels, but that there are important differences across these levels of governance. In particular, the global level is different from the EU and national levels, in that it contains relatively low proportions of business interest representatives. There are important barriers to civil society groups “going global” which need further research. One such barrier is the capacity of civil society groups as constrained by domestic political opportunity structures. Given today’s increasing autocratization of domestic political regimes (V-Dem 2021), we might expect even greater limitations on participation for civil society groups from those countries. Second, the chapters demonstrate that advocacy group strategies are profoundly shaped by interest group type, country of origin, and issue context. Transnational partnerships between different groups often combine inside strategies with service provision, but rarely use outside strategies. Policymakers from democratically accountable countries, who work on salient issues, are more inclined to mobilize their national advocacy group allies. When politicians are faced with political pressures in certain issue areas, they are more likely to mobilize the support and activities of advocacy groups. This pattern is increasingly common across democratic and more authoritarian countries, as countervailing support from more conservative groups can help autocrats resist outside advocacy from challenging activists. Three, advocacy group strategies with high programmatic flexibility can navigate regulations and shape policy in groups’ target countries. In contrast, advocacy groups without this flexibility are shut out of policy discussions and often the target country itself. This issue brings the capacity of advocacy groups to the fore, and suggests that some societal interests are more likely to shape global policy and its implementation. Programmatic flexibility requires a high degree of expertise and monetary resources, implying that there are differential effects of advocacy groups in their target countries. There are three ramifications for research and policy. Based on our findings, we argue against research that sets INGOs and interest groups in contrast to with each other. To be sure, there are limitations to the framing of advocacy groups as having effects on distinct levels of governance, as this disregards that actors often gear their influence strategies toward multiple levels of governance institutions and that can have complex implications. Still, this book shows that combining theories of INGOs and

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interest groups offers great rewards in terms of drawing from the rich insights in both fields. Future research would benefit from even greater cross-fertilization between comparative politics and IR. Second, we argue that future research on advocacy group effects could usefully examine the design and outcome quality of GGIs more systematically. We still know little about whether advocacy groups have positive or negative effects in global governance. Including concepts such as legitimacy, justice, and accountability in advocacy group research would allow researchers to evaluate interest group effects on the quality of outcomes, such as procedural justice or distributive equality. This research could be usefully tied to civil society research on the democratizing nature of civil society in global politics as well as the legitimacy of elite interest group participation on behalf of domestic populations. Third, there are practical implications of our findings for how political opportunity structures advocacy groups can be enhanced. The research suggests that a particular political challenge going forward concerns the dominance of global advocacy group populations from the Global North. As suggested by our theoretical framework, political opportunity structures can be a major obstacle to enhanced global-scale collaboration between GGIs and advocacy groups. Unless advocacy group participation from the Global South is expanded, there will be limited information made available from civil society to GGIs. Moreover, it may lead to a situation where GGIs are out of touch with specific social groups and issues that are underrepresented by advocacy groups in global governance.

Plan of the Book Following this introduction, the second chapter delves deeper into the conceptual distinction between INGOs and interest groups which is at the core of this book. The remainder of the chapters is then organized in three parts. The first set of chapters focuses on advocacy group effects on global advocacy group populations and participation in GGIs. The second set of chapters examines advocacy group effects on strategies and opportunities in GGIs. The third set of chapters focuses on effects on GGI policymaking and implementation. The book finishes with a concluding chapter that draws together the book’s main findings and broader implications. Before delving into the three themes of the book, Chap. 2 rounds up the introductory part of the book. While there are extensive literatures on INGOs and on interest groups, the scholarship has generally evolved in

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parallel tracks with little overlap. Chapter 2 argues that this is an understandable effect of disciplinary boundaries, but it is unfortunate, as many insights from these literatures are highly applicable to one another, including sources of influence and legitimacy, strategies for advocacy, and interest group effects across levels of governance. Just as sociologists studying social movement organizations and political scientists studying interest groups have come to appreciate, there is value in cooperation to advance understanding. Yet there are costs in so doing, which this chapter considers. In Part I, Chap. 3 focuses on the institutionalization of bias in advocacy group mobilization across issue areas and levels of governance. The chapter assesses an underexplored source of variation in advocacy populations, namely the governance level at which advocacy populations are located. More precisely, it examines  why some issue areas and levels are more strongly biased toward business interests than others by using a novel dataset of national, EU, and global advocacy group populations. The results indicate that the global level is different from the EU and national levels, in that it contains relatively low proportions of business interest groups. Chapter 4 focuses on NGOs from BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) in GGIs. It examines patterns of NGO participation in GGIs, and how participation is shaped by incentives and pressures at global and national levels. Empirically, it maps NGO participation by country of origin across 42 GGIs. It also uses regression analysis to explain NGO participation in two major GGIs, the UN Global Compact and the UN Conferences of Parties (COPs) on climate change. The evidence reveals that participation patterns reflect incentives and pressures at global and national levels, including the design of the GGI and NGO capacity linked to domestic political and economic conditions. Chapter 5 explores why some transnational advocacy groups adopt radical, confrontational tactics, whereas others focus on “inside” lobbying and information provision. The chapter argues that increasing resource competition, along with the introduction of new legal and technological tools, has prompted a strategic division of labor whereby some groups (mainly larger, well-established, and resource-rich groups) specialize in gaining political access and media attention, while others (mainly smaller, less established groups) focus on developing “niche” agendas. The argument is illustrated with quantitative data and comparative cases from the area of environmental conservation.

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In Part II, Chap. 6 builds on resource-exchange theory and the concept of political opportunity structures to explain when policymakers target allied or opposing advocacy groups. The analysis relies on a unique database, which draws from 297 interviews with policymakers from 107 different countries at global climate change and trade conferences. The results demonstrate that elected politicians are more prone to seek out opposing societal interests than non-elected policymakers. Moreover, policymakers from democratically accountable countries, who work on salient issues, are more inclined to mobilize their advocacy group allies. Chapter 7 examines the factors that incentivize advocacy groups to seek access to GGI policy venues responsible for regulating the financial industry. The chapter argues that the decision to lobby multiple global venues is a function of the extent of firms’ international business activities and investments. The argument is tested in the case of post-crisis banking regulation in the European Union and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The findings suggest that the more geographically dispersed the cross-border activities of a firm are, the more global venues it is likely to target in order to shape Basel III, Capital Requirements Directive IV, and Capital Requirements Regulation regulations. Chapter 8 explores the role of digital advocacy organizations in campaigning for refugee rights. The chapter demonstrates that the internet has led to new forms of advocacy organization that have professional, permanent staff like INGOs, but their mode of advocacy starkly differs. It examines refugee campaigns across seven organizations in seven different countries between late 2015 and 2017 using extensive primary research, including a dozen interviews with digital activists, journalists, and INGOs. The findings highlight how digital advocacy organizations choose their campaigns primarily based on issue salience to their members, whereas traditional INGOs are driven by issue-expertise in campaign decision-making. In Part III, Chap. 9 explores the role and behavior of transnational partnerships in shaping strategies in, and outcomes of, global fisheries governance. Focusing on the case of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, the chapter theorizes and empirically explores variation in strategies used by transnational partnerships to shape IUU policy and implementation, by drawing on advocacy group and INGO literature. The chapter finds that transnational partnerships often combine inside strategies with service provision, but that they rarely use outside strategies, and analyzes this variation in strategies by looking at changes in issues

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complexity, institutional complexity, and salience for the outcomes of IUU fishing policymaking. Chapter 10 examines how the spread of increasingly restrictive national regulation of INGOs has an impact on the nature of global advocacy group populations and their ability to affect national or GGI policy. The chapter argues that the interaction between resources and institutions provides organizations with programmatic flexibility that enables them to adjust their strategies without changing their core mission. Using case studies of Article 19 and AMERA International, the chapter demonstrates how organizations with high programmatic flexibility can navigate regulations and shape policy in their target country, while those without this flexibility are shut out of policy discussions and often the target country itself. Chapter 11 offers a critical commentary on the edited volume as a whole. It makes four main points. First, one can reflect critically on the framing concepts of “advocacy groups,” “global governance,” and “opportunity structures.” Second, research on civil society and global governance needs to give serious attention to national as well as global dynamics. Third, studies need to examine the interrelation of national and global spheres in world politics; the two are not ontologically discrete and organizations may operate across scales. Fourth, it is important to dissect both the national and the global, particularly in order to expose the social stratifications that shape these advocacy arenas for INGOs and interest groups. Chapter 12 concludes by summarizing the main findings of this research examining advocacy group effects on GGIs in each of the three parts of the book: populations, strategies, and policy and implementation. It then discusses three broader implications for research and policy. First, we discuss how research on the global effects of advocacy groups can be advanced through greater cross-fertilization between comparative politics and IR. Second, we argue that future research on advocacy group effects ought to examine the design and outcome quality of GGIs more systematically, including concepts such as justice and accountability. Third, we draw out practical implications about how advocacy groups can better utilize political opportunity structures for shaping their strategies and impacts on GGI. In sum, this edited volume seeks to push theories of interest groups and INGOs forward. The individual chapters examine how, when, and why domestic and global political opportunity structures shape advocacy group effects in global governance, across global institutions, levels of

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government, advocacy organizations, issue areas, and over time. As interest groups are becoming increasingly involved in global governance, this volume seeks to better understand how advocacy organizations may impact global public goods provision.

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Murdie, A., and D. Davis. 2012. Looking in the mirror: Comparing INGO networks across issue areas. Review of International Organizations 7 (2): 177–202. Nasiritousi, N. 2017. Fossil fuel emitters and climate change: Unpacking the governance activities of large oil and gas companies. Environmental Politics 26 (4): 621–647. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2017.1320832 NGO Branch, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2022. Basic Facts about ECOSOC Status. https://csonet.org (accessed on 16 October 2022). Orsini, A. 2013. Institutional Fragmentation and the Influence of “Multi-forum” Non-state Actors: Navigating the Regime Complexes for Forestry and Genetic Resources. Global Environmental Politics 13 (3): 34–55. Pallas, C.L., and E.A. Bloodgood. 2022. Beyond the Boomerang: From Transnational Advocacy Networks to Transcalar Advocacy in International Politics. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Pallas, C., and A. Uhlin. 2014. Civil society influence on international organizations: Theorizing the state channel. Journal of Civil Society 10 (2): 184–203. Petersson, M.T., L.M. Dellmuth, A. Merrie, and H. Österblom. 2018. Patterns and Trends in Non-state Actor Participation in Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. Marine Policy 104: 146–156. Pevehouse, J.C., T. Nordstrom, R.W. McManus, and A. Spencer Jamison. 2020. Tracking Organizations in the World: The Correlates of War IGO Version 3.0 datasets. Journal of Peace Research 57 (3): 492–503. Prakash, A., and M.K. Gugerty, eds. 2010. Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prakash, A., and M. Potoski. 2014. Global Private Regimes, Domestic Public Law: ISO 14001 and Pollution Reduction. Comparative Political Studies 47 (3): 369–394. Pralle, S. 2006. Branching Out, Digging In: Environmental Advocacy and Agenda Setting. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Raustiala, K. 1997. States, NGOs, and International Environmental Institutions. International Studies Quarterly 41 (4): 719–740. Reimann, K.D. 2006. A View from the Top: International Politics, Norms and the Worldwide Growth of NGOs. International Studies Quarterly 50 (1): 45–68. Risse, T. 2012. Transnational actors and world politics. In Handbook of International Relations, ed. W. Carlsnaes, T. Risse, and B.A. Simmons, 2nd ed. London: Sage. Risse, T., S.  Ropp, and K.  Sikkink, eds. 2015. The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Risse-Kappen, T., ed. 1995. Bringing Transnational Relations Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Scholte, J.A. 2017. Polycentrism and Democracy in Internet Governance. In The Net and the Nation State: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Internet Governance, ed. U. Kohl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sell, S.K., and A. Prakash. 2004. Using ideas strategically: The contest between business and NGO networks in intellectual property rights. International Studies Quarterly 48 (1): 143–175. Skjelsbaek, K. 1971. The Growth of International Non-Governmental Organizations in the Twentieth Century. International Organization 25: 420–442. Skodvin, T. & Andresen, S.. 2008. Nonstate Influence in the International Whaling Commission, 1970 – 1990 (2008) in NGO Diplomacy: The Influence of Nongovernmental Organizations in International Environmental Negotiations, eds. Betsill, M.M. & Corell, E. MIT Press. Smith, J., and D. Wiest. 2005. The Uneven Geography of Global Civil Society: National and Global Influences on Transnational Association. Social Forces 84 (2): 621–652. Steffek, J. 2013. Explaining Cooperation Between IGOs and NGOs—Push Factors, Pull Factors, and the Policy Cycle. Review of International Studies 39 (4): 993–1013. Stroup, S. 2012. Borders Among Activists. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stroup, S., and A.  Murdie. 2012. There’s No Place Like Home: Explaining International NGO Advocacy. Review of International Organizations 7: 425–448. Stroup, S., and W.H.  Wong. 2017. The Authority Trap. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sundstrom, L.M., and L.A.  Henry. 2017. Private Forest Governance, Public Policy Impacts: The Forest Stewardship Council in Russia and Brazil. Forests 8 (11): 445. https://doi.org/10.3390/f8110445. Tallberg, J., T. Sommerer, T. Squatrito, and C. Jönsson. 2013. The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tallberg, J., L.M. Dellmuth, A. Duit, and H. Agné. 2018. NGO influence in international organizations: information, access, and exchange. British Journal of Political Science, online first 48 (1): 213–238. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S000712341500037X. Tarrow, S. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Truman, D.B. 1951. The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 2022. Statistics. Available at: https://unfccc.int/process-­and-­meetings/parties-­non-­ party-­stakeholders/non-­party-­stakeholders/statistics#eq-­1.

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V-Dem. 2021. Democracy Report 2021. Autocratization Turns Viral. Gothenburg: V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. Weiss, T.G., and Wilkinson, R. 2019. Rethinking Global Governance. New Jersey, US: Wiley. World Bank. 2018. Civil Society. Available at: www.worldbank.org/en/about/ partners/civil-­society (accessed 3 April 2018). Yanacopulos, H. 2005. The Strategies that Bind: NGO Coalitions and Their Influence. Global Networks 5: 93–110. Zelli, F. 2011. The Fragmentation of the Climate Governance Architecture. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 2 (2): 255–270.

CHAPTER 2

Close Cousins or False Friends? Studying Interest Groups and INGOs Darren R. Halpin

Introduction Scholarship on interest groups and political advocacy is a sub-field with a degree of coherence around core questions and methods, yet is embracing of contributions from and engagement with other sub-fields (and even disciplines). Within political science, groups are often a component of a broader research agenda. Public policy scholars find groups important as one of a raft of actors who seek to agenda set, develop, and implement policy (both to maintain the status quo and to seek change). More broadly, scholars of political participation, political parties, or of democratic systems, see groups in the context of notions of ‘political linkage’ or as ‘transmission belts’ between citizens and their representatives. Here, the emphasis is on the functional connections between civil society and political institutions such organisations can facilitate. Of note here is the increasing engagement of party and interest group scholars around a D. R. Halpin (*) School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. M. Dellmuth, E. A. Bloodgood (eds.), Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8_2

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theme of ‘political organisations’. There are, of course, other flavours that I have not been able to capture succinctly. The broader point here is that the sub-field of interest group studies is by its very nature intersectional and broadly accepting—even encouraging—of engagement with allied fields. Some treat groups as their main focus, while many more researchers ‘play them in’ when it seems important to address broader questions. Most researchers generally encourage this engagement, and the contributions of diverse sets of scholars are highly valued by the committed group scholar. So we turn to global governance. The edited volume is a welcome contribution from a set of scholars who represent several of the above scholarly camps. Some are predominantly interested in global politics, institutions, public policy, democratic systems of governance, or multiples thereof. Others are perhaps more ‘rusted-on’ interest group scholars who see how their approaches, methods, and questions might also extend to the global context. This work offers yet another intersection in the scholarly study of interest groups and with it prospects for both consolidation and innovation. It is welcome and we hope it will be a marker for stimulating work to come. In this commentary, I try to achieve two related objectives. In the first section, I discuss the question of terminology and whether we can identify a common research object for empirical study. The second section raises some substantive research questions and foci that seem to bind our sub-­ fields together, and offers scope for easy cross-fertilisation. These are related. Agreement on terminology (and equivalencies) enables scholars to answer the substantive questions usefully, while areas of disagreement/ differences produce additional interesting new areas for future inquiry.

Definitions and Scholarly Boundaries Scholarly boundaries and definitional distinctions seem to go hand in hand. The latter are crucial to ensuring that when we say we are studying something, colleagues are clear on what that something is, and that research can add to the previous findings regarding the same phenomenon. In short, accumulation requires attention to definitions: definitions have intrinsic social scientific value. At the same time, these conventions inhere in specific scholarly communities and for the newcomer can become unwanted hurdles to gaining entry.

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For interest group scholars, the work of Robert Salisbury (1984) reminded us that collective voluntary associations for which policy advocacy is a primary or established focus—in other words, ‘interest groups’ by many definitions (see Jordan et al. 2004)—are not alone in advocating for policy outcomes. We know that other actors, like companies, universities, charities, and think tanks—what Salisbury called ‘institutions’, as well as individuals and even other tiers of government—are likely to be actively engaged in lobbying. Interest group scholars, operating within political science, have varied their focus between the narrower gauge of membership groups as interest groups and the more expansive one of organised interests. For example, Baumgartner et al. (2009) would include institutions in their definition of interest groups, even though they are not a ‘group’. In short, interest group scholars may quibble about the labelling (or deploy it creatively), but would broadly accept the basic empirical distinctions the labels seek to tag. Yet definitions are also potentially unwanted barriers to cross-field conversations. In such instances, breaking through requires the (often underappreciated) task of transposition and translation. A case in point is the distinction between social movement organisations (SMOs) and interest groups. After observing high-profile scholars switching between literatures deployed by sociologists and political scientists—and the value of borrowing from one another (here see Baumgartner and Mahoney 2005; McCarthy 2005; Minkoff 1999)—several authors have undertaken the intellectual labour to make explicit the ways in which these categories speak to on another (see Leech 2001; Halpin 2010; Burstein 2019). Policing terminology is rarely welcomed and considered by some a futile strategy. Yet, clarity on terminological usage—and transpositions across otherwise discrete literatures—can open up some opportunities for collaboration and pinpoint the existing overlaps. My own view is that policing-­specific usage is futile, but where individual scholars are explicit and clear on what terms mean it has the happy coincidence of reducing entry costs to new scholars to the field not to mention that it is a necessary condition for scientific progress. A common political science definition of an interest group is something like: a voluntary collective organisation for which policy advocacy is a core function (see Jordan et al. 2004; Beyers et al. 2008). It has been pointed out, of course, that this is not so far from the terms NGO, Global Social Movement, or organised civil society (see discussion in Halpin 2010, chap. 2). Yet, there are clear distinctions and care is needed. For instance,

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normatively approving definitions of global civil society would likely leave business, professional and labour organisations out of organised civil society (see Scholte 2019). The argument in this edited volume transposes questions applied to interest groups to the study of (I)NGOs is a welcome and productive one (Chap. 1). Yet there are some costs to this. For instance, the group definition tends to preclude groups for which service delivery is a core function (Chap. 9). As such, we might not see an organisation like Doctors Without Borders as a group, but would admit Greenpeace as a group. Putting these together, without distinction, seems less than ideal (see Martens 2002 for discussion). One option, as discussed earlier, is to instead take a leaf from the domestic study of not-for-profits (NFPs) or social movement organisations. Here, there is a ready acceptance that some groups are service delivery and others advocacy orientated (and many are hybrids) (see Minkoff 1999).

Finding a Shared Empirical Focus Many who have learnt a foreign language will be familiar with the idea of ‘false friends’: words that sound uncannily similar to something known, but that in fact are unrelated. This analogy comes to mind when considering the relationship between interest groups and INGOs. As has been referred to earlier, international relations scholars in this edited volume have largely eschewed normative definitions because such definitions have had some perverse impacts. For one, they direct us to a view whereby INGOs are by definition progressive agents, which means we neglect to focus on the conservative ideas and agendas around which INGOs can form (see Bob 2012). In addition, they encourage scholars to cherry pick groups as cases because they stand in for a universe, which upon closer inspection turns out to be far more diverse. And, of course, there is the basic issue that we are unlikely to agree what is in fact a ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ cause. Having come to this point, how then to operationalise INGO? One approach is to substitute interest group-like definitions for INGOs and, with that, more easily facilitate transposing political science questions regarding interest groups onto the study of INGOs in IR. In Bloodgood’s recent contribution, the focus is explicitly INGOs. As she rightly makes clear, ‘The analogy between traditional interest groups and INGOs hinges on the definition of an interest group, the definition of an INGO, and the

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empirical characteristics and behaviours of typical members of each group’ (Bloodgood 2011, 96). These are defined as ‘autonomous organisations that are non-governmental, that is, they are not instrumentalities of government; and non-profit, that is not distributing revenue as income to owners; and formal, legal entities’ (Bloodgood 2011, 102). Bloodgood raises the interest group analogy with INGOs. But of course, they may be conceptually analogous but also literally one and the same. If the I in INGO is relaxed, then domestic IGs that work in global arenas count as INGOs. A cursory look at the NGOs with standing at the Ramsar Convention COP11, for instance, shows that the Australian delegation was supported formally by a national branch of an international NGO—WWF Australia.1 Put simply, a Venn diagram of NGOs and INGOs—defined like IGs—would see significant overlap. They are, in many cases, literally the same. While borrowing from interest group studies is one way to resolve this, there is the potential accusation that they may well be false friends. Elsewhere I have attempted to see how commensurable definitions are (Halpin 2010, chap. 2). Taking the term ‘interest group’ in the major political science journals would turn up a small group of specialist articles. Yet, if one used social movement organisation (SMO) or non-­governmental organisation (NGO), a much larger literature is revealed. A range of scholars use other words for what appear outwardly as organisations with similar properties. To SMO and NGO, add civil society organisations (CSOs), voluntary sector organisations (VSOs),2 and third-sector organisations.3 The literature on ‘civil society’ includes the above and various more obscure labels such as private voluntary organisations (PVAs) and principles issue networks (PINs) (Scholte 2000, 174). There is a literature examining Global Social Movements (GSMs) (Cohen and Rai 2000). What are we to make of this diversity? Table 2.1 outlines some of the key contenders and the criteria on which they may be applied to real organisations. Taking the main definitional labels, and locating key examples of definitions in the literature, produces the finding that most labels are highly commensurable. All labels refer to 1  The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance is a Convention signed in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran. COP refers to the Conference of Parties to the convention. 2  This term is normally limited to the voluntary sector, such as those working in charities and social services. 3  Often used interchangeably with VSO.

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Table 2.1  Commensurability of labels. Source: Adapted Halpin (2010) Label

NGO

NPO CSO SMO Interest group

Key author

Willets (2005) and Martens (2002) Salamon and Anheier (1996) Scholte (2000) Diani (2003) Jordan et al. (2004)

Criteria Policy focus

Collective (affiliates)

Non-­ profit

Non-­ govern.

Not a party

Formal org.

✓b

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✕

✓

✓a

✓

✓

✓

✕ ✓d ✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓c ✓ ✓

Some controversy about whether mutual associations and cooperative banks should be included despite their profit distributing function b Some would not insist on policy activity c The key feature here is that it is not a familial organisation—that is beyond the family d Some may insist on a public good caveat in terms of aims of the SMO a

organisations that are formal (have a headquarters, staff, and so on), that are not political parties (they don’t contest elections), that are non-­ governmental (meaning that they are not an entity such as a government agency or department), that are non-profit (they are not simply firms lobbying on their own account), and that are collective organisations (they have affiliates of some kind). There is less agreement on whether these organisations need to have a policy focus, with this being generally irrelevant for scholars using NPO or CSO labels. One element which is not well flagged in this table, given its focus on organisational properties, is purpose. Some scholars would argue that the policy aims of SMOs (and often NGOs and CSOs) need to be pursuing the public good or public interest. That means in practice that business and professional groups are often excluded in these studies (Table 2.1). If we take a definition of interest groups as set out by Jordan et al. (2004)—a collective voluntary association for which policy advocacy is a primary or established focus—for instance, to what extent does this definition talk past those who may study NGOs, CSOs, SMOs, or NPOs? It is self-evident that, just as in the interest group field, no ready and binding consensus exists on defining these terms either. The upshot of this discussion is that we can explain what interest group scholars study in the language of others (insofar as they

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adhere to the definitions I note earlier). Thus, interest groups are more or less equivalent to SMOs and politically dedicated NGOs. Further, and put another way, this approach simply omits those NPOs and CSOs that are not engaged in political activity and that are not organised. Many labels are applied not on the basis of organisational attributes but on the basis of their purported ‘ends’ or ‘aims’. There is, or at least can be, a reason for different labels. I argue that we should stick to definitions that focus on organisational attributes when conducting empirical analysis; however, in so doing, it is important to acknowledge that other usages may be guided by different considerations. Understandably, some will prefer labels because they sound more positive or acceptable. By way of analogy, in my own work I have noticed that interest group staff prefers to be called advocates rather than lobbyists. So it is that some groups prefer to be Civil Society Organisations than say Interest Groups, because the former sounds more benign. However, from an empirical research perspective, the key motivation is whether the label is applied to a specific set of cases, and on what basis. This can help assess normative claims, so it is a relevant task even for theorists and normative-inspired scholars. Sorting out claim and counter claim, for example, regarding democratic potential and practice is difficult where there is no certainty that the ‘groups’ being generalised about are indeed one and the same.

Emerging Research Agendas: Thoughtful Transposition and Cross-Fertilisation Definitions and labels are one thing. But what about the transposition of concepts and approaches from domestic interest group analysis to global politics? I offer some thoughts on some initial areas for discussion. Interest group scholars conceptual language of involvement (or contact), access, and prominence has been picked up by IR colleagues to good effect (see Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). Familiar data structures within global contexts and institutions—for instance, lists of attendees at global meetings, and so on—that ‘fit’ into established routines of analysis, offer the most direct forms of transposition of questions and frameworks. While replication of interest group frameworks on access is satisfying for interest group scholars to see, there are important adaptations that might be made based on the insights of IR colleagues. And, in turn, these

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may well inform interest group scholars. Indeed, at least one impulse guiding this edited volume is to transpose the empirical ambitions being pursued in interest groups studies at the national level to the global arena, but another instinct might be to look for opportunities from the other direction. In this respect, a curious omission is the absence of a clear focus beyond multilateral forums on trade and treaty-based institutions. In her splendid review, Bloodgood (2011, 115) remarked that IR scholars had dwelt on influence as the change of the policy positions of nation states, but this perhaps underplayed the variety of goals that might be pursued. One can understand why this is a core focus—data are available, and the structure of engagement between organised interests and ‘policy makers’ is not dissimilar to that of groups and parliaments (and so on). Yet, surely one of the key attractions of studying global or political and policy development is the prospect of groups as part of governance styles that have limited or partial state involvement? (see, e.g., Börzel and Risse 2010). As is now well established, non-state actors—specifically (I)NGOs— can play an important role in developing governance regimes that either place state actors as part players, or else side-step them altogether. This approach has not featured prominently in the interest group literature, yet in related fields on governance and global public policy it is an established research genre. This edited volume, for instance, has several articles that pursue precisely this mode of governance (see Chaps. 6, 7, and 9). So, if power and authority in the global system are not exclusively in the gift of nation states, and therefore not exercised exclusively through intergovernmental institutions, but by private modes of governance, how might this shape research strategies? Our standard survey-based lists of insider or outsider policy strategies typically do not include items on such forms of political work. It is this kind of scholarly enterprise where the two literatures might collaborate to make progress, rather than one or other side simply ‘give way’. One way forward is to update these batteries of questions to better encapsulate the ways in which groups engage in policy. In so doing, it is also salient that studies in the interest group field have shown—at the domestic (Binderkrantz 2005) and global (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017) levels— that groups mostly combine strategies. The area of group legitimacy is another area where there is a convergence of research attention. Here, the status of close cousins might generate some serious step-changes to scholarly research across political science

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and IR. Just as there is a noted crisis of trust in our national level democratic institutions, the same debate has been ongoing in respect of global governance institutions/organisations for some time. And, as with analysis of the national level, some see organised civil society—ostensibly interest groups and INGOs—as critical to plugging gaps in democratic legitimacy. It is in this context that attention has turned to the democratic legitimacy of NGOs and interest groups themselves. It is often assumed that hard-nosed empiricists eschew discussions of normative issues. However, in the same breath, it is often the case that we motivate our empirical puzzles with recourse to these very same debates. In the case of global governance institutions, there seems an even stronger case for delving deeply into questions of legitimacy. Why? Well, the standing of organised interests in global affairs is almost certainly more complex to sort out than in a national context. While cosmopolitans would certainly wish for a global civil society against which—and to which—global NGOs could be accountable and responsive too, the fact is that there is no such entity. There is no global media which we can hope to occupy the same public sphere. And, while we might like to say we are citizens of the world, there is no global parliament to which we effectively select leaders and hold them to account. So what standing do groups have? In a domestic context, we might refer to internal forms of accountability and responsiveness—elections of leaders, exit and voice where there are core disagreements with policy positions, and so on. In the global setting, some groups seem ‘doubly detached’: they have constituent organisations, yet these themselves are largely estranged from active members. Instead, they are platforms for the aggregation of thousands of passive donors or for a handful of large wealthy donors. Whichever way, their agenda is driven by highly professionalised staff whose legitimacy is only loosely connected to claims of representational recourse. Abandoning highly normative definitions of global civil society which define constituents as pursuing approved goals and assumed responsiveness to their supporter base (or some diffuse community of the affected) does not mean sweeping normative questions to the side. Quite the opposite, what it allows is for a more refined discussion in which scholars can debate what the foundations of legitimate claims to represent or seek solidarity might be based (see Bexell et  al. 2010; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2020; Halpin 2006).

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Concluding Remarks: More Close Cousins than False Friends! Areas of slightly different emphasis generate new opportunities for future inquiry. They mean we can borrow and transpose semi-familiar ideas, frameworks, and concepts to data and contexts that seem ready-made for the application. At the same time, we might co-generate new ideas and frameworks where neither field has really developed concerted action, or otherwise made clear strides. If this sounds overly upbeat, it is meant to. The interest group field, as discussed at the outset, is made stronger in its engagement with abutting fields, and by a strong cross-understanding among its students. This edited volume is a testament to this ongoing effort, the rewards of which are there for all to see. The Interest Groups & Advocacy journal, in turn, is committed to hosting this dialogue to build the field.

References Baumgartner, F., and C.  Mahoney. 2005. Social Movements, the Rise of New Issues, and the Public Agenda’. In Routing the Opposition: Social Movements, Public Policy and Democracy, ed. D. Meyer, V. Jenness, and H. Ingram, 65–85. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Baumgartner, F., J. Berry, M. Hojnacki, D. Kimball, and B. Leech. 2009. Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bexell, M., J. Tallberg, and A. Uhlin. 2010. Democracy in Global Governance: The Promises and Pitfalls of Transnational Actors. Global Governance 16: 81–101. Beyers, J., R. Eising, and W. Maloney. 2008. Researching Interest Groups in Europe and Elsewhere: Much we Study, Little We Know? West European politics 31 (6): 1103–1128. Binderkrantz, A. 2005. Interest Group Strategies: Navigating Between Privileged Access and Strategies of Pressure. Political Studies 53 (4): 694–715. Bloodgood, E. 2011. The Interest Group Analogy: International Non-­ governmental Advocacy Organizations in International Politics. Review of International Studies 37 (1): 93–120. Bob, C. 2012. The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Börzel, T., and T.  Risse. 2010. Governance Without A State: Can It Work? Regulation & Governance 4(2): 113–134.

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Burstein, P. 2019. The Influence of Organizations on Policy: Theories, Findings, Conclusions. Interest Groups & Advocacy 8 (1): 1–22. Chalmers, A.W., and A.A. Iacobov. 2019. The Stakes of Global Venue Shopping: Examining Bank Lobbying in the Basel Committee and the European Union. Interest Groups & Advocacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-­019-­00059-­8. Cohen, R., and S.M. Rai, eds. 2000. Global Social Movements. London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press. Dellmuth, L.M., and E.A. Bloodgood. 2019. Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance: Populations, Strategies, and Political Opportunity Structures. Interest Groups & Advocacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-­019-­00068-­7. Dellmuth, L., and J.  Tallberg. 2017. Advocacy Strategies in Global Governance: Inside versus Outside Lobbying 65 (3): 705–723. ———. 2020. Why National and International Legitimacy Beliefs are Linked: Social Trust as an Antecedent Factor. The Review of International Organizations 15: 311–337. Diani, M. 2003. Networks and Social Movements: A Research Programme. In Social Movements and Networks, ed. M.  Diani and D.  McAdam, 299–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halpin, D. 2006. The Participatory and Democratic Potential and Practice of Interest Groups: Between Solidarity and Representation. Public Administration 84 (4): 919–940. ———. 2010. Groups, Democracy and Representation: Between Promise and Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jordan, G., D. Halpin, and W. Maloney. 2004. Defining Interests: Disambiguation and the Need for New Distinctions? British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6 (2): 195–212. Leech, B. 2001. Social Movements and Interest Groups: Same Message, Different Frequencies. In Paper presented at the 1st General Conference, European Consortium for Political Research, University of Kent, September 6–8, 2001. Lucas, K., M.  Hanegraaf, and I.  De Bruycker. 2019. Lobbying the Lobbyists: When and Why Do Policymakers Seek to Influence Advocacy Groups in Global Governance? Interest Groups & Advocacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41309-­019-­00050-­3. Martens, K. 2002. Mission Impossible? Defining Nongovernmental Organizations. Voluntas 13 (3): 271–285. McCarthy, J. 2005. Persistence and Change Among Nationally Federated Social Movements. In Social Movements and Organization Theory, ed. G.  Davis, D.  McAdam, W.  Scott, and M.  Zald, 193–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minkoff, D.C. 1999. Bending with the Wind: Strategic Change and Adaptation by Women’s and Racial Minority Organizations. American Journal of Sociology 104 (6): 1666–1703.

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Petersson, M.T. 2019. Transnational Partnerships’ Strategies in Global Fisheries Governance. Interest Groups & Advocacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41309-­019-­00056-­x. Salamon, L.M., and H.K.  Anheier. 1996. The Emerging Nonprofit Sector: An Overview. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Salisbury, R.H. 1984. Interest Representation: The Dominance Of Interest Groups. American Political Science Review 78 (1): 64–78. Scholte, J.A. 2000. Global Civil Society. In The Political Economy of Globalization, ed. N. Woods, 173–201. New York: St Martins. ———. 2019. Civil Society and Global Governance: Exploring Transscalar Connections. Interest Groups & Advocacy. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41309-­019-­00067-­8. Willets, P. 2005. What is a Non-Governmental Organisation? Download at h t t p : / / w w w. s t a f f . c i t y. a c . u k / p . w i l l e t t s / C S -­N T W K S / N G O -­A RT. HTM. Accessed 2009.

PART I

Populations and Participation

CHAPTER 3

No Borders, No Bias? Comparing Advocacy Group Populations at the National and Transnational Levels Joost Berkhout and Marcel Hanegraaff

Introduction The ‘biased’ nature of interest representation before government is one of the perennial and central concerns driving the study of advocacy groups (e.g. Lowery et al. 2015; Schattschneider 1960). In a typical policy process, we find larger numbers of organizations that represent business interests than organizations with citizens as constituents (e.g. Berkhout et al. 2017). The relative presence of business interest representatives matters. Whoever sings in the chorus of group politics determines whose interests have a voice, and whose interest may gain access to the policy process, let alone exert influence on its outcome. As any lobbyist is to likely state, ‘If you are not at the table, you may be on the menu’.

J. Berkhout (*) • M. Hanegraaff Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. M. Dellmuth, E. A. Bloodgood (eds.), Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8_3

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However, the extent of advocacy group bias is notoriously difficult to identify, given that the actual distribution of interests in society is conceptually and empirically impossible to determine (Lowery et  al. 2015). Nevertheless, as a second-best approach, the assessment of bias (1) ‘should always entail comparison across time, jurisdictions or venues’ (Lowery and Gray 2004: 21) and (2) should be founded on existing population ecological models of advocacy groups density given that ‘inequalities in interest representation are deeply political’ (Lowery and Gray 2016: 52). To accommodate these objectives, we compare the relative share of business groups that are active in advocacy group populations across different jurisdictions: the national, the EU and the transnational levels. This comparison allows us to explore whether transnational politics is more or less skewed towards business interest than regional or national politics. This systematic multi-level comparison is important for several reasons, also identified in Chap. 1 of this edited volume. First, although a focus on ‘business bias’ is one of the most common themes in the study of interest group politics, it is not in the study of international relations (IR) (see Hanegraaff et al. 2012; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). In the latter area, bias is certainly a key concept; however, it commonly refers to the traditional IR focus on relations between countries and assesses the relative presence of non-state actors from developed and developing countries or across different types of NGOs (i.e. resources and insider status). We, however, hardly ever encounter direct comparisons between business groups and NGOs (but see Steffek et al. 2007; Hanegraaff et al. 2012; Nordang-Uhre 2014; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). We contend that business bias is also relevant for the IR literature. That is, NGOs, the more common foci of IR scholars, do not advocate in a vacuum, but often stand on opposite side of business organizations in policy conflicts. This means that a comparison must be made of business lobby activity at distinct levels of government in order to understand the role, impact and effectiveness of NGOs in global politics. Moreover, the relative presence of several types of non-state actors fundamentally shapes the organizational environment of international institutions, the nature of the transnational policy process and the likelihood and legitimacy of particular political outcomes. For instance, in its practices to engage with ‘civil society actors’, the European Commission attempts to increase its ‘input legitimacy’ for various policy initiatives (e.g. Greenwood 2007). The potential intermediary function of interest associations is especially important to venues that are largely outside of direct electoral or party political control, such as non-domestic

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politics. Civil society actors end up being the de facto only non-state watchdogs of transnational policy-making. At this point, however, we are mostly left in the dark about the relative scope of mobilization of business groups and NGOs at the transnational level. Second, comparativists struggle to identify the potential effects of the hospitable or hostile institutional environments on the relative presence of business and other groups in the relevant advocacy group populations. Hence, the issue of how biases differ across government levels, and whether one system is more prone to business dominance than others, remains unclear. Although we are certainly aware that our endeavour will not allow us to make bold statements on the ‘biased nature of transnational politics’, mapping the activity of advocacy groups across different jurisdictions is a necessary first step to this end (see Lowery et al. 2015). In line with the objective of this edited volume (see Chap. 1), we construct hypotheses from the IR1 and Comparative Politics (CP)2 literature. We identify distinct, a priori equally valid arguments that point in three different directions. First, the so-called world polity thesis posits that growing intergovernmental collaboration provides additional opportunities for domestic-deprived interests to ensure that their voice is heard (this thesis is embedded in the broader political opportunity structure literature, see Chap. 1). This mechanism would benefit non-business interests at the transnational level and should drive us to expect that the higher the level of governance, the lower the level of corporate political presence. Second, by contrast, collective action theory presumes that business bias increases with the distance between constituents and advocacy groups. Finally, recent studies argue that biases across jurisdictions are likely to stay constant after controlling for the issues on the agenda of the system studied. Specifically, the scope, salience and conflict on issues are likely to attract particular interest representatives, largely independent of the level of government (Berkhout et al. 2017; Hanegraaff and Berkhout 2018). Any differences we might observe in mobilization at the transnational and national levels are therefore the results of the type of issues central at varying levels of governance and not the institutional opportunity structure at these levels. We theoretically develop and contrast these arguments and assess them empirically by comparing the proportion of business 1  This refers to the literature regarding ‘INGOs’, which more broadly is deeply embedded in the social movement literature (see Chap. 1). 2  This refers to the ‘interest groups literature’, which is rooted in the CP literature.

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organizations that are active in policy domains at the transnational, European and national levels. In the subsequent sections, we first describe the broader theoretical relevance of our paper. We then focus on our more specific question on how business group activity might differ across political levels, and formulate three hypotheses. We provide a description of our data sources and consequently test our hypotheses. We conclude our paper with a reflection on our results, including a link to the core message of the edited volume, and a pathway for future research.

Theory: Bias in Advocacy Group Populations The population ecology approach to group populations provides a theoretically advanced, comprehensive model for the numbers and types of advocacy groups in a given political system (Gray and Lowery 1996; Abbott et al. 2016). This model explains these numbers on the basis of societal, supply factors (area) such as the number of constituents, and political, demand factors (energy). The perspective also includes a number of mechanisms to clarify changes over time (density dependency, varying environmental sensitivity/contextual dependency) (Lowery and Gray 2016). Simply put, the population ecology model assumes that biases in advocacy group populations can be explained by differences in the policy process and between (socio-)economic bases. In this chapter, we focus on particular components on both the explanatory and explanandum sides of the model. First, on the explanatory side, we highlight the institutional differences in levels of government. Existing studies heavily emphasize the importance of institutional demand in terms of the information needs of policy makers or the attraction of groups to high-spending policy domains. With uni-level, single-country research designs, such studies do not cover institutional differences between systems as wholes. Our study is the first to compare similar types of advocacy communities across different levels of politics. We cannot empirically measure whether variation across levels is caused by discrepancies in institutional structure (the demand side) or factors on the supply side of advocacy mobilization, such as the existence of a fertile membership resource environment. In that sense, we cannot fully specify the causes for the variation we find. However, to eventually understand why the national and transnational levels are different (if they are), one first needs to analyse whether,

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and how, they vary. Therefore, this chapter should be recognized as a first step, certainly not a final step, in assessing biases across levels. Similar caution is essential with regard to the explanandum side of the model. That is, we focus on a very particular type of bias, namely variation in the relative share of business activity in advocacy group communities. This form of bias disregards other types, such as bias in access or influence among advocacy groups. Our interest in explaining business bias is motivated by the normative concerns outlined in introduction. Specifically, concerns about advocacy and lobbying are commonly associated with the influence of major businesses on public policy. Thus, our findings should not be interpreted as more general than our purpose: business representational presence across political jurisdictions.

Bias Across Levels: Three Competing Hypotheses We have several expectations regarding variation in business activity across the national, EU and transnational levels. In line with the objective of the edited volume, we assess hypotheses with a strong theoretical foundation and empirical track record in both the IR literature and CP literature (e.g. Keck and Sikkink 1998; Dür and Mateo 2014). Nevertheless, the relative isolation within which these subfields operate seems to have contributed to the diverging empirical findings. Our first hypothesis is commonly empirically supported in IR, whereas the latter two, contrasting hypotheses find support in comparative studies on interest groups (i.e. in the CP literature). However, none of these hypotheses, individually or collectively, have been fully assessed, partly due to a lack of comparative data. More precisely, we do not find a single study that has actually compared advocacy populations across three governance levels. We specify our hypotheses in turn. The first hypothesis is the world polity hypothesis. The so-called world polity thesis posits that growing intergovernmental connections and the increasing transnational mobilization by non-state interests provide additional opportunity for domestic-deprived interests to ensure that their voice is heard internationally (Finnemore 1996; Barnett and Finnemore 2004). As classically noted by Keck and Sikkink (1998), the losers of a political conflict have an incentive to shop for a more favourable venue (see for an EU application [and rejection] of this ‘boomerang’ hypothesis: Beyers 2002; Kriesi et al. 2007). To illustrate, if an environmental NGO is confronted with a government that is unwilling to adopt necessary climate

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policies, it has the opportunity to mobilize at the EU or transnational level. This may lead to international pressure on national governments to adopt relevant climate policies. NGOs can thus shop for a more receptive venue with the aim to indirectly influence national policies. In this manner, the welcoming nature of global political opportunity structures should produce relatively more balanced patterns of transnational mobilization than we observe in domestic political systems. Business groups tend to outnumber NGOs at domestic political institutions; thus, domestic NGOs rather than business interest organizations should largely be the ones to attempt to ‘shop’ for a more favourable international venue to put pressure on their domestic governments. This perspective implies that we are likely to witness relatively large numbers of NGOs that have ‘fled’ the domestic, inhospitable political environment and are active in a more welcoming transnational environment where a moderately low bias towards business interest representation exists. In other words, business bias should become smaller at higher levels of politics. Some empirical work certainly gives credence to this view. For instance, at climate conferences, one of the few venues in which population-level data are available, scholars observe a reasonable balance between business mobilization and NGOs (Hanegraaff 2015). This finding stands in contrast to observations in other countries, in which we normally see much more business groups politically mobilized than NGOs (see Lowery et  al. 2015; Berkhout et  al. 2017). Our first hypothesis is that the transnational politics is less skewed towards business than domestic politics. H1 ‘World polity hypothesis’: the higher the level of government, the lower the proportion of business interest representatives compared to other representatives. Our second hypothesis combines collective action theory with arguments on institutional strength. We label this hypothesis the collective action hypothesis. This hypothesis states the exact opposite of the world polity hypothesis, namely that the relative presence of business is higher at the international level compared to the national level. Similar to H1, it assumes that political opportunity structures are crucial intermediates of biases in advocacy populations. In contrast to our arguments leading to H1, we now recognize that the transnational opportunity structure is relatively weakly developed, rather than only being ‘welcoming’ (which it still may be). This premise implies that its structuring effect on group populations may be relatively weak and that other explanatory factors noted in

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the population ecology model (i.e. those factors on the supply side) are likely to be particularly consequential. In other words, weakly developed institutional environments such as transnational politics provide a fertile ground for the relative ‘winners’ of the logic of collective action. The ‘winners’ are commonly business groups, which therefore should dominate the advocacy population more in weaker institutional environments than in venues where institutional rules strongly structure access to the policy-making process. This is especially in cases where incentives such as (national) re-election or (European or transnational) legitimacy motives lead policymakers to create a relatively favourable structural institutional context for non-business interests. European, and to a stronger extent global, governance is relatively young and still weakly institutionalized compared to national states; hence, we should observe that institutions at the national level are structured in such a manner that non-business interests are attracted to them (e.g. via consultation mechanisms) and that the absence of such institutional structuration causes higher levels of business bias at the international and transnational levels. In other words, the relative ease of business interests to organize collectively commonly leads to larger numbers of business interest association compared to other groups (e.g. De Bruycker et al. 2019). This relative benefit is likely to persist in the policy process, unless institutional practices such as favourable access or government to non-business groups encourage more balanced interest representation. In addition, advocacy groups have room to set the agenda themselves and act as creators of institutions (Kohler-Koch 1994; Wessels 2004: 199–203; Hanegraaff 2015), especially in an institutional vacuum such as on issues at very early stages of the policy process, and in nascent or weak policy environments such as in some transnational arenas. This situation provides opportunities for relatively strong groups to shape the institutional setup in a manner that is favourable for future policy battles (see Hanegraaff 2015). In other words, in this view, advocacy groups are not merely shaped by political opportunity structures but also change them for their own benefit. This argument commonly implies that the relatively strong presence of business interest representatives in a given political environment, in itself, triggers the political dynamics that encourage business interest mobilization, by, among others, incentivizing governments to deal with particular issues in narrow and exclusive policy circles (e.g. Hacker and Pierson 2014; Schattschneider 1960). Several studies suggest that such closing of policy circles also occurs in a transnational context,

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most notably on trade policies (e.g. Woll 2008). These two arguments lead to our second hypothesis, stating that the transnational level is more skewed towards business groups than the national level: H2 ‘Collective action hypothesis’: the higher the level of government, the higher the proportion of business interest representatives compared to other representatives. These hypotheses start from the distinct, institutionally driven, political and organizational incentives present at different levels of government. Depending on our view of the strength and nature of these institutions, these incentives lead to contrasting outcome regarding the presence of business interest representatives relative to other interests. The first hypothesis stresses that transnational venues are more open to NGOs (relative to business interests) than national governments, leading NGOs to be more active at the transnational level. The second hypothesis suggests the opposite. In the following argument, building towards our third and final hypothesis, we posit that most of the differences between levels and venue arise from the types of policies addressed. For instance, we expect that venues dealing with market regulatory policies, such as dominant in the policy profile of the EU, will more strongly attract business interest representation compared to other representatives. NGOs are not less welcomed at this level; they simply show less interest. This is a very different outlook on bias across governance levels, as this explanation starts with the idea that policies rather than institutions structure politics (Berkhout et al. 2017; Hanegraaff and Berkhout 2018). Any difference that we notice in mobilization at the transnational and national levels results from the type of issues on the political agenda rather than the institutional structure. This view is distinct from the former two in the sense that it identifies the relevant political context or political opportunity structures at the meso-level rather than the system or the macrolevel (see discussion of ‘meso-level political opportunity structures’ in Kriesi 2004). Political issues are located at the meso-level and vary in a lot of ways. However, the most significant matter for now is that the actual substance of particular policies attracts more business group attention, whereas other policy domains draw more citizen group attention. More specifically, the activities of businesses steer their interests to directly intersect with economic policies. Citizens certainly care about economic issues, but they also commonly have preferences on various other topics and causes such as human rights protection and a clean environment. At the same time, the

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policy agendas and competences of distinct levels of government vary as well. Most notably and as stipulated in treaties, European rules and regulation pertain to particular fields of policy and identify other fields as being of exclusive national competence. Similar differences indeed occur at the international level; for instance, trade or environmental policies are more prominent agenda topics due to their international implications. The distinct policy profiles at any level of government and in terms of the policies acted upon should therefore drive the attraction of particular types of groups (Berkhout et  al. 2017; also: Hanegraaff and Berkhout 2018; Leech et al. 2005; Baumgartner et al. 2011). This perspective signifies that any skewness towards business groups might be an outcome of the type of issues that are addressed rather than a function of the system-­ level institutional prioritization of business interests. To illustrate, environmental policies attract environmental groups and energy companies, agricultural policies attract farmers, and so on. As a consequence, and to revert to the former example of climate conferences, we might simply observe a balance between NGOs and business groups at these venues not because of the level of governance (i.e. national or global) but because the environmental policy domain attracts more NGOs than other policy domains, also at lower levels of politics. In this view, issues rather than political institutions structure conflict and produce biases. The final hypothesis therefore states: H3 ‘Agenda hypothesis’: there are no differences in the relative presence of business interest representatives (compared to NGOs) across levels of governance.

Research Design To test our hypotheses, we compare the composition of national-level, EU-level and transnational-level populations of politically interested membership organizations. Our data collection strategy is in line with recent mapping studies of advocacy group populations (Berkhout et  al. 2017; Halpin and Jordan 2012). Next to the transnational and EU levels, we study France, UK, Germany and the Netherlands. Our expectations deal with the differences between transnational- and national-level political systems; thus, we do not focus on the systemic differences between national-­ level advocacy populations. Through the selection of four countries considered to belong to different interest representation regime types

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(e.g. Balme and Chabanet 2008: 28)—UK as a pluralist system, the Netherlands and Germany as corporatist systems and France as statist system—we enhance the external validity of the observed differences between the global level, the EU and the four states. We collect data about associations and aggregate these observations in order to analyse clusters of associations within policy domains (our unit of analysis), given that ‘business bias’ is always a characteristic of groups of organizations. Also note that we deal with policy domains rather than particular policy conflicts within these (as is the case in, for instance, Beyers et al. 2014). This matches our research interest in the relatively structural, population ecological variation in numbers of organizations present (organization of interests into politics) rather than the more volatile, strategic policy mobilization (active on particular policy issues). These are conceptually and empirically distinct phenomena as policy mobilization may, for instance, be triggered by cue-­ givers and take the form of bandwagons of attention, whereas organizational mobilization is commonly explained in reference to the organizational resources available in a given environment (and requires ‘disturbances’ to produce actual political action, i.e. policy mobilization). For our sample, we combine top–down (policy-oriented) and bottom– up (mobilization-oriented) mapping strategies to construct representative samples of the organizational populations selected. The use of different types of sources reduces potential sampling bias (cf. Berkhout and Lowery 2008; Berkhout et  al. 2017). These sources include, first, directories of associations, most notably for the countries: OECKL Deutschland (2011), the Pyttersen Almanak, Netherlands (2014), the Directory of British Associations (2012) and, following the practice of the EUROLOB project, a combination of French lists of associations.3 For the European level, we use the European directory of Public Affairs (2014). For the international level, we rely on the Yearbook of International Organizations (2017). These databases produce relatively similar lists; inclusion is based not on political activity but on the mobilization of groups in a certain geographical entity (see Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017, for a similar sampling strategy).

3  More specifically, the French sampling frame includes the 133 members (Titulaire and Suppleant) of the Le conseil national de la vie associative¸ the 220 professional member federations of the Confédération Général des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises (CGPME) and the 87 member federations of Mouvement des Entreprises de France (MEDEF).

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For our second sources (i.e. ‘top–down population’), we include membership organizations that are active in their respective parliaments and sample organizations from the Lobby register of the Bundestag (2014) and from the participants in hearings and roundtables in the French (2011–2014), Dutch (2011) and British (2011) parliaments. The Dutch and British parliamentary lists were generously shared by researchers in the Interarena project (see for further details Pedersen et al. 2015). For Europe, we rely on the register of accredited lobbyists to the European Parliament as can be found in the EU Transparency Register (2014). For the transnational level, we rely on the UN accreditation database that lists all organizations with an official accreditation at any of the UN bodies (see Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). The data sources are merged per country and subsequently sampled randomly. We present data on the organizations with (1) members or supporters (and disregard individual firms, agencies etc.) and (2) with at least some interest in public policy (to identify the policy areas of interest to them, which is required for the third hypothesis). We exclude firms and other individual institutions from the analysis because their political interest is impossible to validly observe from their websites.4 This is a common practice in non-American studies of interest groups (e.g. Klüver 2013; Eising 2009) and leads us to underestimate the relative presence of business interests at all levels studied, but not the object of our study, the likely systematic differences in bias between the levels. While our coding choice contributes to this underestimation, our impression is that the selective practices of the data sources used are more important in this regard. That is, it seems that, compared to their plausible investments in public affairs departments, individual firms are relatively infrequently invited to parliamentary hearings and are not commonly targeted by the publishers of associational directories (only the EU PA directory includes them). For a valid study of the relative presence of individual firm lobbyists, one probably needs a fundamentally different data collection approach that is  This includes 312 firms (62 from the Netherlands, 53 active in the EU, 95 from France, 84 from the UK, 6 from the German sample and 12 from our international sample). The infrequent presence of individual firms in the international sample compared to the other samples suggests that the empirical support for the ‘world polity’ hypothesis (as reported below) is likely to be even stronger had we found a way to validly measure the policy interests of firm lobbyists. 4

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Table 3.1  Number of associations by country/region Entity France Germany Great Britain Netherlands European Union International Total

Number of associations 184 192 171 138 252 225 1162

outside the scope of our current study (e.g. see Aizenberg and Hanegraaff 2019). These steps result in a sample consisting of 1162 organizations, ranging from 138 in the Netherlands to 252 at the EU level (see Table 3.1 for an overview). These sampling procedures do not produce perfectly comparable samples of advocacy groups. To start, with regard to the directories, in the French case we could not rely on a general inclusive directory and similar to other researchers (Kohler-Koch et al. 2013: 7–8) used alternative lists instead. This approach makes the inclusion of established, professionalized (business interest) associations in the French case more likely than in the other cases. This matter is not only a data issue, as previous research also points to the structured nature of French business interest mobilization (e.g. Saurugger 2013; Woll 2009). Second, concerning the parliamentary data, the Bundestag and European Parliament registers do not require ‘invitation’ on the part of members of the parliament, whereas the parliamentary hearing data in the UK, France and the Netherlands do. In all cases, there is some effective political–administrative threshold for registration: the EP secretariat requires recurring parliamentary appointments (otherwise guest or day passes are distributed), the Bundestag only administers national federations, and the invitation procedures for hearings tend to be very open but also filter out presumably inconsequential actors. We do not have strong a priori reasons to expect that these political–administrative practices systematically affect the relative presence of business interest representatives. We expect that it systematically affects the presence of (individual) bureaucratic representatives. These are relatively frequently invited to hearings but are less frequently present on the EP and German

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registers.5 We exclude such bureaucratic representations such as of the association of municipalities from our measurement of bias. Although we are aware that these lists do not perfectly match each other, they are the most similar lists that we could reasonably combine. Moreover, we have no reason to doubt that this approach causes systematic errors in our sample. Nonetheless, we consider the limitations of our findings in the conclusion. For our data collection, we rely on information provided on the websites of the advocacy groups. Several extensively trained master students coded the information. These coders are fluent in at least two languages included in the project and are assigned organizational records from multiple sources and countries. The intercoder reliability test reveals that coders have a fairly high agreement on the policy interest scale (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.71) and especially the group-type variable (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.83). Note that when accounting for co-variation, these scores need not be interpreted conservatively (Neuendorf 2002: 152). Our dependent variable is the proportion of the business interest associations per domain jurisdiction dyad (our unit of analysis). This is, for instance, our observation, through the procedure described earlier, of 33% of business interest associations in the health care domain in the European Union (see also Tables 3.2 and 3.3 in the empirical analysis). We distinguish between business associations and other interests on the basis of the types of members of organizations. Associations with commercial firms as members are business interest associations. Associations with other types of members, most notably individuals or public agencies, are considered non-business interest groups. Coders also classify the policy domains within which the association is active using the major (or minor) codes of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) classification scheme (https:// www.comparativeagendas. net/). Organizations may be active in multiple policy fields. In the following analysis, we present only the area that coders judged to be the most important to the organization. The policy domain is the relevant environment within which ‘bias’ occurs and is therefore the unit of analysis of our multivariate model. Simply put, our dependent

5  We exclude from policy areas classification (and analysis) 749 representatives from (semi-) public organizations of which 21 are from Germany and 11 at the EU level. Please note that we include a robustness analysis in Table A3 that addresses these differences.

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Table 3.2  Distribution of advocacy groups by policy domain and governance level National (in %) Macroeconomic issues Human rights issues Health Agriculture Labour and employment Education Environment Energy Immigration and refugee issues Transportation Law, crime and family issues Social welfare Community development and housing Banking, finance and commerce Defence Space, science and technology Foreign trade International affairs and foreign aid Government operations Public and water management Cultural policy issues Skewnessa

European Union (in %)

International (in %)

18 8 14 4 8 4 11 2 3 4 3 4 3

16 4 6 11 1 4 19 6 0 5 1 4 0

5 13 11 5 2 11 13 3 0 3 4 1 1

5 0 1 1 3

4 0 4 2 8

4 2 6 4 10

2 1 4 1.6

2 1 2 1.7

1 1 0 1.0

The columns add up to 100%. In total, 1162 organizations are included (France, 184; Germany, 192; Great Britain, 171; the Netherlands, 138; European Union, 252; and International 225)

variable allows us to distinguish business representation in specific policy domains and across political jurisdictions. Our key independent variable concerns a systemic, institutional effect that causes the variation in advocacy group populations, in particular the distinction between global, EU and national-level political systems. We include this variation as dummy variables in the analyses. More precisely, we incorporate three jurisdictions in our analyses: the domestic level (i.e. France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands), the European level

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Table 3.3  Proportion of business groups per policy domain and governance level National (in %) Domestic macroeconomic issues Human rights issues Health Agriculture Labour and employment Education Environment Energy Immigration and refugee issues Transportation Law, crime and family issues Social welfare Community development and housing Banking, finance and commerce Defence Space, science and technology Foreign trade International affairs and foreign aid Government operations Public and water management Cultural policy issues Average bias across sectors

75 4 29 41 43 7 37 82 50 41 16 7 26 59 N.A. 33 100 0 8 20 33 36

European Union (in %) 78 0 33 82 0 10 62 93 N.A. 50 33 0 N.A. 70 N.A. 60 83 5 20 100 25 42

International (in %) 55 0 8 42 0 0 37 83 N.A. 57 13 0 0 38 0 38 38 0 0 N.A. 0 22

and the international level. The objective is to analyse whether the proportion of business groups that are active in each of these venues varies in a statistically significant manner. We also include the level on which the policies of concern to the organization are decided. This approach allows us to assess our ‘agenda’ hypothesis. The policy agenda topic codes of the CAP scheme are all classified in terms of the level of government that dominantly addresses the topic, using a five-point scale: subnational or national, mixed: national or EU, EU, including Eurozone, mixed: EU or international/transnational, including bilateral and international (see the conversion table in Online Appendix A3).

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In our multivariate analysis, we control for the density per policy domain, as business bias could be a result of overall density, although previous findings are inconclusive in this regard.6

Empirical Analyses We initially demonstrate the extent to which business activity varies across jurisdictions and policy domains, and subsequently assess our hypotheses in a multivariate regression model. Descriptive Analysis We present in Table  3.2 the relative density per policy domain at three levels of governance. The data are structured as the relative share of groups per policy field and per jurisdiction. This approach allows us to assess the policy interests of advocacy groups, divided by the three political levels. To provide an example, of all the groups that are active at the national level, 18% lobbied on macroeconomic issues (see first row, first column); of all the EU groups, 16% lobbied on macroeconomic issues (next column); and of all the groups identified at the international level, 5% focused on macroeconomic issues (last column, first row). We derive several main observations from our analysis. First, systematic differences emerge between the policy interests of advocacy groups that are active at each political level. That is, typical national policy fields include health, labour and employment issues. Other policy fields are central at the EU level, such as agriculture, energy and environment. We find that the groups that are active at the international level tend to focus on issues such as human rights, education, foreign trade, international affairs and foreign aid. On a number of policy fields such as banking and transportation, however, we observe that equal proportions of groups are active across the levels studied. Certain issues match well at two levels, such as macroeconomic issues (across the national and EU levels) and science and technology (at the EU and global levels). In our subsequent analysis, we 6  Specifically, at the level of issues, Baumgartner and Leech (2001) suggest that business interest organizations are more likely than others to maintain presence on even very low density issues, whereas Hanegraaff and Berkhout et al. (2018) indicate a higher relative presence of business interests on ‘crowded’ issues. Density is measured by proportions per policy domain per system.

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examine whether these distributions are associated with the topics that are commonly on the decision-making agenda of these jurisdictions. Second, we notice a highly skewed distribution of groups over policy fields. This observation is consistent with earlier studies (see Baumgartner and Leech 2001; Berkhout et al. 2015; Halpin and Binderkrantz 2011). At the national level, only four policy domains capture half of the attention of the advocacy community (i.e. macroeconomic, health, environment and labour). At the EU level, we observe a similar situation with three policy areas (macroeconomics, agriculture and environment) occupying 46% of the attention of advocacy groups. At the transnational level, we observe a somewhat lower skewness score (see bottom row of table) and five policy fields gain the largest amount of attention (human rights, health, education, environment and international affairs). Overall, the distribution highlights a substantial variation across policy domains on which groups focus, with typical national, EU and international areas, and policy areas that attract groups at all levels. We now explore the relative share of business presence per policy area and level. Table 3.2 presents the exact values of our dependent variable (to be used in Table  3.4): the proportion of business interest associations per policy domain. To illustrate, the top left column demonstrates that of all Table 3.4  OLS regression estimates of the proportion of business interests per policy field

Intercept Governance level International (ref.) National European Union Density Competence (H3) Observations R2 F-test Prob. > F

(1)

(2)

0.190*** (0.051)

0.267* (0.151)

Ref. 0.138** (0.057) 0.208*** (0.073)

Ref. 0.131** (0.058) 0.208*** (0.073) 0.586 (0.796) − 0.056 (0.073) 116 0.32 4.39 0.01

116 0.28 2.43 0.05

The model is linear regression with fixed effects at the level of policy fields (N = 21, not displayed) Significance: *p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

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the organizations advocating macroeconomic issues at the national level, 75% are business organizations; at the EU level, the proportion is 78%; and at the international level, the proportion is 55%. A number of important observations must be noted. First, the bottom row indicates the average proportion of business interests per domain in each jurisdiction. The largest proportion is observed at the EU level (x̄ = 42%), the second-largest proportion is evident at the national level (x̄ = 36%), and the international level is the least populated by business groups (x̄ = 22%). The difference between the national and EU levels is substantially smaller than the difference between both and the international level. This finding suggests preliminary empirical support for the world polity hypothesis that advocacy communities at the international level are less skewed towards business interests than advocacy communities at the national level. However, this observation is only part of the story. We also notice that the variation across policy domains is considerably larger than the variation across jurisdictions. To illustrate, the policy domains with a relatively strong business interest presence at the national level (i.e. macroeconomic issues, agriculture, energy, transportation, banking and foreign affairs) have similar levels of business interest attention in the other jurisdiction studied. Although some variation also occurs across jurisdictions in certain policy areas (e.g. the agriculture sector is far more skewed towards business groups in the EU than at the national or global level), the overall trends across jurisdictions are substantially more consistent than the variation across issues. This finding suggests that the theoretical mechanism identified in the agenda hypothesis (policies rather than institutions drive bias) seems empirically valid. Overall, our descriptive data indicate that the relative share of business groups is smaller at the international level than at the EU or national level. This finding is in line with the world polity thesis. At the same time, we also observe a strong variation across policy domains that may explain these differences, as our ‘agenda’ hypothesis predicts. However, we cannot descriptively disentangle the effect of domains and jurisdiction; we therefore proceed with a multivariate analysis. Multivariate Analysis Our ‘agenda’ hypothesis assumes that the typical nature of the political agenda in a given system drives the types of interests that are active. Earlier studies on the EU case reveal that issues decided at the EU level more

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commonly affect the interests of businesses and attract larger numbers of business interest groups (such as in agriculture, energy and transport) than issues in which the national government has sole legislative and substantive competence (such as in education, social welfare and community development) (Berkhout et  al. 2017). A similar logic may occur at the international level, where most activity is on issues with relatively low business activity more generally, such as human rights, health and foreign aid. To make sure that this ‘policy-level’ effect does not drive the results, we model the proportion of business groups that are active in each policy field as the dependent variable, and explain this variable by the jurisdiction of the population (i.e. national, EU or global), the density of policy communities and the competence of the policy field (ranging from national to global, see Online Appendix). The model is estimated in a multi-level manner with fixed effects for the 21 policy fields. This makes it possible to control for unobserved systematic differences between policy areas (which are likely, given the substantial policy area similarities reported in Tables 3.2 and 3.3). The results are presented in Table 3.4. As a robustness check, we provide a different modelling strategy (fractional logit regression, see Online Appendix A1). Remember that the distribution of our dependent variable is highly skewed (see Table 3.2), and therefore, a fractional logit model potentially produces better specified estimations. The results are similar, and we therefore choose to present the simplest model. In Online Appendix, we also report an alternative organization-level model (see Online Appendix A2). We present the main model and the main model with control variables to assess whether any change in the results occurs. In all three models, we observe a substantial and statistically significant difference in business activity across jurisdictions. The positive and significant coefficient reported under governance level indicates that at the international level, we find smaller proportions of business interest groups than at the national and EU levels. Model 1 restates our earlier descriptive observation of this difference. The insignificant coefficients on density and competence reported in the bottom rows of model 2 denote that business bias is unaffected by the total number of interest group representatives in a given policy domain and business bias is also not larger in domains where decision-making commonly occurs at relatively high levels of governance. The density finding is in line with the inconclusive state of the literature on this topic, with some studies finding a negative relationship (Baumgartner and Leech 2001) and other studies establishing a positive one (Hanegraaff and Berkhout 2018). To assess the size of the difference

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.5 .4 .3 .2 .1

Predicted level of business bias

Predictive Margins with 95% CIs

national

EU

global

level of mobilization

Fig. 3.1  Predicted business bias per level

between the levels, we present a marginal effects plot based on model 2 in Fig. 3.1. The figure illustrates that the predicted proportion of business groups that are active at the international level is approximately 20%. The proportion at the national level is 33%, whereas it is roughly 40% at the EU level. Nevertheless, the overlapping confidence intervals indicate that the difference between the EU and the national levels is not significant. This finding is in line with earlier work (see Berkhout et al. 2017). The difference between the international level, on the one hand, and the EU and national levels, on the other hand, is statistically and substantially significant. These analyses imply that the transnational level has lower relative numbers of business interest representatives than the EU and nation al levels, when we also control for the issues on the agenda at these distinct levels. Importantly, this finding is confirmed if we rely on a fractional logit regression (see Online Appendix A1) or use a different, actor-centred modelling strategy (see Online Appendix A2). Our analysis provides substantial empirical support for the world polity hypothesis (H1).

Conclusion We started this chapter by stating that the ‘bias question’ is one of the most central issues in the interest group literature. Notwithstanding the vast attention to this issue, studies that analyse how bias differs across the national and international levels are lacking. We proposed three

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hypotheses to explain potential variation across these jurisdictions, which all have a strong embedding in the broader IR or CP literature. We find that business bias becomes smaller at higher levels of politics. This finding strongly supports the world polity hypothesis. The welcoming nature of global political opportunities apparently results in relatively balanced patterns of transnational mobilization. After controlling for several issue characteristics, we observe that the business interest community is less active at the international level compared to the national level. However, our data cannot precisely tell us about the motivations of advocacy groups to be present at a given level. Future studies could therefore assess the exact mechanism that underlies the pattern observed. More precisely, they could ascertain whether groups ‘flee’ inhospitable national interest systems or whether these groups are largely attracted to transnational opportunities. The collective action hypothesis states that business bias is relatively strong at the international level. In weaker institutional venues, we should expect the relative ‘winners’ of the logic of collective action, commonly business groups, to dominate the advocacy group population. We find no evidence for this hypothesis. However, we are not ready to fully reject the hypothesis. Under particular circumstances, strong advocacy actors may manage to control the institutional setup in such manner that they can exclude the meaningful participation of others. Future studies could therefore assess such practices at relatively low levels of aggregation (i.e. on particular issues rather than policy domains) and include data on relatively ‘narrow’ policy circles or venues. The agenda hypothesis states that bias is deeply entrenched in policy fields. The distinct policy profile of any level of government drives the attraction of particular types of groups (see Berkhout et al. 2017). In this view, ‘policy drives politics’ and policy characteristics rather than political institutions primarily structure conflict and produce biases. Our observation that the proportion of business groups varies much more systematically and to a greater extent across policy areas rather than across jurisdictions confirms this expectation. This pattern signifies that issues are indeed key sources of bias. Nevertheless, the issue effect does not mitigate the difference across the international and lower levels of government. This result is in contrast to studies on the EU case (see Berkhout et al. 2017). We find that policy agendas indeed affect biases at the transnational level, but the effect is not as strong as the hypothesis suggests. This weakness may be due to the fact that the political agenda at the international

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and transnational levels is insufficiently specified or strong for a precise assessment of this effect. That is, authoritative decisions in any policy domain are hardly ever fully made at the supranational level. Furthermore, the attraction of advocacy groups to the international level probably does not relate to immediate concrete attempts to shape policy, but such attraction is more diffuse, long term and focused on agenda creation. Future studies could assess these arguments in more detail, for instance by comparing different policy domains at the transnational level, or also consider the characteristics such as salience, conflict and scope of particular issues within domains. More broadly, our chapter connects studies of interest groups politics and IR in two ways (see Chap. 1). First, we combined theoretical insights from both fields. Both the IR literature and interest group literature have analysed and incorporated ideas from each of the three hypotheses, but the interest group literature has found more confirmation of the collective action (H2) and issue explanations (H3). The IR literature, instead, tends to emphasize the welcoming nature of global political opportunity structures for advocacy groups (H1) that are deprived of political opportunities in domestic political environments. We also empirically combined a focus on the national and EU levels with the international level, the main emphasis of IR scholars. We believe this endeavour has been fruitful, as both fields provide a unique perspective on a relatively similar area of interest. Nevertheless, our study also leaves unanswered several questions on the nexus between IR and interest group studies. In addition to the aforementioned directions of research, we deem that further research is necessary on at least a few questions. First, we could not precisely identify why the transnational domain is more receptive to non-business organizations compared to business organizations. Our analysis provides a largely descriptive account of business mobilization at each governance level per policy domain. That is, we demonstrate the important differences across these jurisdictions, but we rely on theoretical arguments rather than empirical observations about the exact reasons for these differences. As argued, our ‘best guess’, building on the world polity thesis, is that it has to do with the particular political opportunity structures of the global domain relative to national politics. We assume that national opportunity structures are rather inhospitable to citizen groups and international opportunities are relatively favourable to them, whereas the reverse opportunity arrangements apply to business interest organizations. Indeed,

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earlier studies indicate that many business groups, at least those business groups from developing countries, are less frequently active at the international level, because they have such strong influence on the positions of national governments on global issues (Hanegraaff 2018). As stated, we require more specific empirical studies on this mechanism. Moreover, we assume that interest communities are located in distinct jurisdictions. Although this assumption is valid to some extent (groups are targeting the EC, the UN or their national governments), these communities are fluid and overlapping in many instances (see Berkhout et  al. 2018). How this fluidity might affect our results would be interesting to consider. For instance, pivotal questions could address the following points: Do advocacy groups coordinate among each other about the relative attention they pay to particular institutional levels? Are groups active at multiple levels at once? Do particular national groups financially support the establishment and maintenance of groups at higher or lower levels of government? We welcome studies that examine these complex mechanisms underlying the biased nature of global politics. Third, we analysed a very particular type of ‘bias’, namely bias in terms of the relative presence of different types of advocacy groups at several governance levels. Other patterns of bias are not explored, such as the access or influence these groups have on global decision-making (see Lowery et al. 2015). Pertinently, one could rely on a different operationalization of diversity in interest communities. We made a distinction between business interests and other groups, which is relatively common in the interest group literature. However, the IR literature teaches us that many more types of diversity may be explored, including the variation in the organizational authority of groups and how this characteristic affects their presence at the international level (Stroup and Wong 2017), the types of networks groups engage in Keck and Sikkink (1998) and the hierarchy among advocacy groups at the international level, such as those from the Global North and South. Also, our conceptualization of business bias could be extended to include firms. We focused on membership groups because the political priorities of firms are not easily identifiable. But, as several studies highlight, we do not have conceptual reasons to exclude them and firms increasingly lobby individually (see Aizenberg and Hanegraaff 2019). These questions once again are beyond the scope of this chapter, but they are important avenues for future research. Last, we are hesitant to support the idea that democratic governance, at any level of government, may be strengthened by including various

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stakeholders in the decision-making process. As our study shows, the set of interests organized around particular domains and at distinct levels varies a great deal, and the nature of that variation suggests that it is unlikely to be fully reflective of the actual variation in interests in society. It seems to be driven by particular (institutional) demands, needs or opportunities on the part of policy makers, rather than actual concerns, needs or interests in society. This is a pessimistic conclusion, which in our view deserves even more serious scrutiny in future studies. Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this chapter (https:// doi.org/10.1057/s41309-­019-­00060-­1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Funding  Funding was provided by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Grant No. 451-12-017).

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CHAPTER 4

NGO Participation in Global Governance Institutions: International and Domestic Drivers of Engagement Laura A. Henry, Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, Carla Winston, and Priya Bala-Miller

Introduction The participation of NGOs in global governance institutions (GGIs) has inspired optimism among many observers about resolving the world’s most pressing issues, ranging from HIV/AIDS to climate change and deforestation. NGOs participate in global institutions to make use of rules, standards, and information to leverage effects in their home countries.

L. A. Henry (*) Department of Government and Legal Studies, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, USA e-mail: [email protected] L. M. Sundstrom Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. M. Dellmuth, E. A. Bloodgood (eds.), Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8_4

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Secretary-general of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon has highlighted the role of NGOs in formulating and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, stating, ‘Without the participation of non-­ governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society groups, no initiative, however visionary, can be fully achieved’ (UN News 2016). However, NGO participation is uneven across states and GGIs. Describing and explaining how NGOs from different countries participate in GGIs offers insights into domestic and international opportunities and obstacles to NGO participation at the global level—an essential precursor to NGOs’ ability to influence global governance. We bring scholarship from the global governance and comparative politics literatures together to show how factors at both the international and domestic levels shape NGO participation in GGIs. Scholars such as Tallberg et al. (2018), Raustiala (1997), and Gordenker and Weiss (1995) have found that greater access for NGOs in GGIs leads to greater NGO influence—or what we call potential influence (Boström and Hallström 2010). Yet this relationship does not fully explain the drivers of variation in NGO participation (what others call ‘involvement’ (Halpin and Fraussen 2017)) across those GGIs that officially permit NGO access. We propose two additional dynamics. First, GGIs with a more open political opportunity structure that grants more significant roles to NGOs in consultation and decision-making (and thus greater potential influence) also attract greater numbers of NGO participants. Second, on the domestic side, scholars have long argued that political and resource configurations shape the capacity and influence of NGOs as advocacy organizations (McAdam 1982; Smith and Wiest 2005; Tarrow 2005, 2011). We anticipate that elements of the domestic political opportunity structure (signified in this chapter by levels of democracy, wealth, and the civil society environment) drive variations in the distribution of NGO participation in GGIs by country of origin. The limitations of scarce resources and constrained political environments force NGOs to make hard choices about participation. Synthesizing these global and domestic factors, we hypothesize that NGOs C. Winston School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia P. Bala-Miller School of Business, Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada

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from challenging domestic contexts possess fewer opportunities to participate at the global level and therefore conserve their efforts to focus on GGIs that afford the greatest opportunity for influence. In this way, we extend and then empirically test a basic premise of Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) ‘boomerang pattern,’ in which advocacy groups unable to influence their domestic government seek leverage internationally. To investigate which factors shape the range of advocacy organizations participating in global governance, we map and analyse patterns of participation by NGOs from different countries across a number of GGIs. As noted above, we argue that incentives for and barriers to NGO participation exist both at global and at domestic levels, confirming the importance of domestic political opportunity structures (POS) and extending the opportunity structure concept to the GGI itself. First, we look at the ‘demand’ side of the equation, considering whether the range of roles granted to NGOs within a GGI affects NGOs’ likelihood of participating. We use an original dataset including detailed participation data on 7528 worldwide NGO participants in 42 distinct GGIs to compare patterns of participation by NGOs from high-, medium-, and low-income states and from states with more democratic or authoritarian political regimes. We find that NGOs gravitate towards GGIs that offer them more significant roles and therefore higher potential for influence, regardless of their origin country’s income or regime type. Yet NGOs from wealthier and more democratic states are less prone to cluster in GGIs offering high-influence potential than those from poorer, less democratic states. Thus, the demand side driven by GGIs’ opportunity structure has less impact on these relatively advantaged NGOs. Next, we examine the ‘supply’ side of NGOs from each state using an exploratory regression analysis of NGO participation in two GGIs for which over time data are available: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNF-CCC) and the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). This analysis further supports our contention that features of a country’s domestic POS shape NGO capacity, helping to explain variation in GGI participation. As expected, we find that levels of democracy and wealth are positively correlated with participation. Paradoxically, however, the analysis also suggests that more hostile domestic civil society environments, offering fewer options for NGO consultation and participation in national-level policy processes, drive NGOs to ‘go global’ and participate in GGI venues in higher numbers than do more hospitable civil society environments. In this way, our finding that NGOs

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from more hostile domestic contexts are more likely to mobilize globally echoes the ‘boomerang pattern’ identified by Keck and Sikkink, but deepens our understanding by demonstrating where NGOs are mostly likely to focus their energies. More broadly, our analytical framework integrates factors at multiple levels to examine a rich, cross-sectoral dataset and demonstrates patterns of NGO engagement across global governance institutions that are similar to those identified by previous narrower analyses.

Theorizing Political Opportunities: NGO Participation in GGIs Since the end of the Cold War, scholars have charted a marked increase in the roles of non-state actors such as NGOs in international relations (Charnovitz 1997; Mathews 1997; Clark et al. 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Boli and Thomas 1999; Florini 2000). In keeping with the edited volume, we define NGOs as advocacy organizations pursuing principled goals and public benefits, often using a mix of domestic and global actions (Chap. 1). The scholarly literature generally has separated the study of international NGOs (INGOs) operating globally and interest groups active at the domestic level, when in fact many NGOs pursue advocacy at both levels simultaneously. For example, scholars have focused on the key role that INGOs have played in the design and proliferation of GGIs (Pattberg 2005; Boström and Hallström 2010; Willetts 2011; Wong 2012; Stephen and Zürn 2014). The participation of domestically rooted NGOs—particularly those beyond the West—in GGIs has received less attention, with notable recent exceptions (Bexell et  al. 2010; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017; Hanegraaff et al. 2015; Smith and Wiest 2005; Tarrow 2005). The literature so far has tended to examine either how domestic POS characteristics (such as wealth or democracy) affect NGO or interest group participation by country (Hanegraaff et al. 2015, e.g., Smith and Wiest 2005) or how GGI access rules affect NGO participation regardless of country of origin (Boström and Hallström 2010; Tallberg et al. 2018). In practice, domestic and international opportunity structures both shape the behaviour of NGOs as advocacy groups and are potentially crucial in influencing which voices are heard in global institutions. We propose examining the interaction between the POS at both of these two levels to see how NGO participation in GGIs offering roles of varying influence potentials is mediated by varying elements of the domestic environment.

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Our mapping of NGO participation in GGIs is a unique effort to capture broad trends in NGO participation in global governance beyond singular thematic areas such as the environment (Najam et al. 2004; Raustiala 1997), climate (Böhmelt et  al. 2014; Roger et  al. 2017), fisheries (Dellmuth et al. 2018), international trade (Hanegraaff et al. 2015), or humanitarian action (Gordenker and Weiss 1995). To explain patterns of NGO participation in GGIs, we explore several factors of the domestic and international POS that shape and constrain advocacy organizations in GGIs. As noted above, we hypothesize that in general NGOs are attracted to participate in GGIs that offer the greatest potential for influence and that this trend is likely to be most apparent among NGOs facing challenging domestic environments. We elaborate on how this argument advances the existing scholarly literature in the two following sections.

Political Opportunity Structure Within GGIs Institutional environments provide incentives or disincentives that shape NGO participation, even at the global level (Bloodgood and Clough 2017; Heiss and Johnson 2016). This set of incentives, regardless of the level of governance, can be conceptualized as a ‘political opportunity structure’ which Tarrow defines as the ‘consistent but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources’ to act to achieve their goals (Tarrow 2011). Within GGIs, the POS may vary as NGOs may play a more or less consequential role depending on the institutional context and rules of access established by the GGI itself (Halpin and Fraussen 2017). Does the GGI allow NGOs to participate as full members, or on a limited, ad hoc, or ‘by invitation only’ basis (Willetts 2000)? Can NGOs participate in the development and revision of GGI rules and standards? There is a great deal of variation across GGIs in the formal and informal rules of access and rule-making for NGOs. Even within United Nations processes, access for NGOs varies considerably across agencies and meetings (Krut 1997; Willetts 2011), while the World Trade Organization has historically been closed to NGO access (Nanz and Steffek 2004, pp. 325–326). Dellmuth and Bloodgood note that ‘democracy in GGIs [is] conceptualized as relatively generous access rules,’ but suggest that access does not necessarily translate into influence for advocacy organizations (Chap. 1). We agree and argue that NGO access is only the first step towards gaining

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influence within GGIs. We are using the concept of ‘influence’ in a slightly different way than commonly invoked in the interest group literature where influence often refers to control over political outcomes (Dür 2008; Dür and de Bièvre 2007; Lowery et al. 2008). By focusing on potential influence through the range of roles available for NGOs, we consider how a GGI may empower NGOs to shape the design and implementation of global governance, rather than the outcome of that governance effort. To assess potential influence, we consider the consultation and decision-­ making roles made available to NGOs with a GGI. NGOs may be influential in shaping the rules and standards that are adopted, offer critical expertise on the issue being addressed (Böhmelt 2013, p. 57; Clark 2001; Raustiala 1997; Tallberg et al. 2018), serve as intermediaries for accessing important social networks and communities, or engage in monitoring other actors to ensure the effectiveness of the initiative (Boström and Hallström 2010). We hypothesize that opportunities for NGOs to play more significant governance roles within GGIs should lead to more NGO participation, especially for lower-capacity NGOs that cannot afford to participate in all venues. As NGOs engage with GGIs, they attempt to make the greatest progress towards influencing global policy while conserving scarce organizational resources. In other words, they try to obtain the ‘biggest bang for their buck.’ As they look for opportunities and manage constraints, we argue that NGOs engage in venue shopping—participating in those governance institutions where they expect to achieve the greatest impact (Chap. 1). NGOs from less democratic and less economically developed states may face greater limitations in personnel and budgets and may be able to participate only in a few GGIs. Thus, we contend that a GGI that offers participating NGOs more significant roles and potential for influence may be seen as a worthwhile venue, even for those NGOs that possess relatively low capacity.

Domestic Political Opportunity Structures Another set of factors that clearly shape NGO participation in GGIs relates to domestic conditions for NGO development—the domestic POS, broadly defined, as emphasized elsewhere by others (Smith and Wiest 2005). While organizational capacity—in terms of expertise, personnel, and financial resources—varies among individual NGOs, we can

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generalize about domestic environments that are more or less conducive to NGO development. Social movement scholars first articulated the importance of more open or closed POS on advocacy groups’ ability to locate elite allies, use political cleavages, and respond to repression (McAdam 1982; Tarrow 2005, 2011), while the resource mobilization school highlighted the role of material conditions on advocacy (McCarthy and Zald 1977). More recent research has shown that states vary significantly in how they enable or obstruct social activism—the legal context may be more or less permissive (Bloodgood et al. 2014), funding more or less abundant (Cooley and Ron 2002; Sundstrom 2006), the state may be a partner or opponent (Gomez and Harris 2015; Hsu et al. 2017), and social organizations may have a longer or shorter history of development (Smith and Wiest 2005). Material constraints on NGOs certainly impede their ability to engage globally (Boström and Hallström 2010; Hanegraaff et al. 2015). In our analyses below, we focus on a few key elements of domestic POS that are measurable cross-nationally with available datasets. We examine the factors of political regime openness, economic wealth, and civil society environment. Consistent with previous studies, we expect that the level of democracy in a domestic political regime will influence NGOs’ ability to mobilize globally, with less democratic circumstances likely to dampen NGO participation. In addition, we anticipate that access to material resources, which we measure with the rough proxy variable of income levels, will increase NGOs’ capacity to participate in GGIs, with more resource availability allowing more frequent mobilization across borders. Finally, we expect that a more precise measure of the environment for civil society organizations, including access to domestic decision-making processes, will show that a more empowering civil society environment will encourage more NGO participation in GGIs. Ultimately, it is the layering of factors at the international and domestic levels that profoundly shape NGO participation. To restate our expectations, highlighting the interaction of factors, we expect that NGOs from unfavourable domestic circumstances will be most attracted to participating in GGIs that offer the greatest potential for influence as they have scarce resources to expend on advocacy at the global level.

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Methodology Our analysis of NGO participation in GGIs seeks to capture a broad cross-­ section of institutional types and issue areas in global governance. To achieve this, we constructed an original dataset using Held and Hale’s (2011) compilation of transgovernmental initiatives and the York University Compendium of ethics codes (McKague and Cragg 2007) to develop a list of GGIs that include non-governmental organizations as participants.1 The relevant GGIs from Held and Hale and the York Compendium yielded a total of 126 initiatives (see Appendix B). From this comprehensive set of GGIs, we identified 93 GGIs that claimed to include NGOs as key actors. A subset of 42 initiatives provides detailed NGO participation data publicly.2 We then coded NGO participants for these 42 initiatives to link them to country of origin. Similar to Tallberg et al. (2018, p. 221), in our coding, an ‘NGO’ encompasses any organization recognized as such by the GGI, capturing a wide array of groups engaged in advocacy ranging from human rights organizations to business associations and even GONGOs, but excluding for-profit corporations. Country of origin for each NGO participant was determined based on information from GGI directories, when available, or organizations’ websites for the addresses of the main office.3 We examine the institutional context that NGOs face both within GGIs and domestically. To this end, we use our dataset in two ways. First, we consider the POS of the GGI as creating incentives for NGO participation. We coded each GGI with regard to the types of governance roles granted to NGOs, and their potential to influence the GGI’s formulation and implementation of global rules and standards (see Appendix A). For example, NGO roles may include consultation as experts or as stakeholders, commenting or voting on proposals, and monitoring of rules and 1  Held and Hale aim to provide a comprehensive overview of transnational governance. York Compendium focuses on GGIs that govern private sector actors in issue areas ranging from the environment to corruption and human rights (McKague and Cragg 2007). 2  The information varies significantly in structure, however, including whether participation is continuous (and therefore counts are cumulative) or serialized (and counts are annual or meeting-based); whether potential membership is universal or restricted; and whether the GGI issues addressed are broad (inviting global participation) or narrow (making NGOs from countries without that issue unlikely to join). 3  We included branch offices of international NGOs in particular countries (e.g. Greenpeace Russia is coded an NGO from Russia, rather than originating from the global office in Amsterdam). See Appendix A for full coding scheme.

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standards. Each additional role adds a point to our scoring system for potential influence. With these data, we carry out a descriptive mapping exercise to compare rates of participation by NGOs in different kinds of GGIs. In addition, we use the data generated across the 42 GGIs in an exploratory manner to see whether NGOs from countries with different income levels, regime types, and domestic civil society environments cluster in certain types of initiatives.4 Although variation in GGI design and data restrictions make multilevel modelling of domestic factors affecting participation infeasible, we select two institutions for more rigorous analysis of how elements of the domestic POS may shape NGO participation in GGIs. We deepened the dataset by gathering more granular annual participation data for two major GGIs: attendance at the UNFCCC Conference of Parties and new memberships in the UN Global Compact (UNGC) on corporate social responsibility.5 The data from these two GGIs are particularly helpful as they include the largest numbers of NGO participants, are unrestricted and of universal interest with regard to global participation, and are documented on an ongoing annual basis, unlike many other GGIs. We analyse variation in NGO participation by country using data on membership in the UNGC from 2002 to 2012 and the attendance at annual Conference of Parties (COP) meetings of the UNFCCC from 2005 to 2014 (United Nations 2018a, 2018b). From 2002 to 2012, 3108 non-business NGOs became members of the UNGC. UNFCCC COP meetings attracted 5027 NGO delegations from 2005 to 2014. These data allow us to conduct an exploratory regression analysis for NGO participation in these two large initiatives to examine which country-­ level factors—those related to general democratic freedoms, material resource access, and civil society operating environment—appear to influence the number of NGOs participating in each GGI per country, per year.

4  Income levels are taken from the World Bank’s income groupings: high, medium, and low GDP per capita. Regime type corresponds to the Polity project’s designation of autocracies (score of − 6 to − 10), anocracies (− 5 to 5) and democracies (6 to 10). Civil Society environment groupings are created from V-Dem’s (v. 7) civil society participation index, with ‘poor’ ranging from 0 to .399, ‘medium’ from .4 to .699, and ‘good’ from .7 to 1. 5  This difference in data structure and availability is the major reason why our regression models are limited; we feel that a multilevel model and/or incorporating all 42 GGIs in the previous section are inadvisable. We thank Jennifer Allan for providing access to her UNFCCC NGO participant data for the years 2006–2011.

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Mapping NGO Participation in GGIs: Does Influence Potential Matter? The 42 initiatives that provided a detailed breakdown of NGO participation in registries or membership databases yielded a combined total of 7528 current or cumulative NGO participants as of mid-2017, depending on the GGI’s institutional structure. These GGIs offer a range of NGO roles. First, we consider whether a GGI offers access or the possibility for NGO inclusion. For each GGI in our sample, we ask whether there is an institutional commitment to the role of civil society through allowing NGO access. Second, to assess NGO roles in GGIs and potential influence on GGI negotiation and implementation, we evaluated formal mechanisms for NGO involvement ranging from roles of offering feedback on rules and standards, to attending annual meetings, offering technical expertise, or monitoring other actors’ conformity to the GGI’s rules. Appendix A provides an overview of how NGO roles were evaluated to classify the influence potential offered by GGIs, while Appendix C provides more detail on the 42 GGIs. This mapping exercise suggests how the opportunity to participate in more influential roles in GGIs shapes NGO participation—although given that this participation datum covers only a subset of GGIs worldwide and a wide variety of institutional structures enabling participation, we are cautious in venturing generalizations. We have classified the 42 initiatives for which detailed participation data were available based on the influence potential for NGOs within the GGIs, grouping into ‘high’ (11 GGIs), ‘medium’ (14 GGIs), and ‘low’ influence potential (17 GGIs) categories (see detailed list in Appendix C). As a shorthand, we refer to these categories as ‘high influence,’ ‘medium influence,’ and ‘low influence,’ but must emphasize that these labels refer to the potential influence based on the roles offered to NGOs in the GGI, rather than actual influence achieved in policy outcomes. Low-influence GGIs typically offer little beyond basic acknowledgment of NGOs as participants or supporters. For instance, on its website the UN Principles for Responsible Investment merely lists NGOs as ‘Supporters,’ or those who ‘would like to publicly express support for the PRI within their constituency, raising awareness within the investment community of responsible investment and the PRI’ (Principles for Responsible Investment, n.d.). Meanwhile, high-influence GGIs offer multiple NGO roles for exercising influence, including forms of institutional, expert and occasionally delegated authority (Avant et  al. 2010).

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The Forest Stewardship Council permits NGOs to participate as voting members in development of FSC standards and monitor implementation (Forest Stewardship Council, n.d.). The graph below shows the per cent of NGO participants in GGIs at each level of potential influence (Fig. 4.1). Our overall finding, based on the available data, is that NGOs from all countries gravitate towards high-influence GGIs. Although high-influence GGIs form only a minority of GGIs in our dataset (11/42 initiatives), they attract over 60% of worldwide NGO participation in the dataset, as compared to GGIs that offer medium or low levels of potential influence to NGOs. These data suggest NGOs would be more likely to join GGIs that offer more consequential governance roles and therefore greater potential influence, which may not be surprising. However, it is important to remember that frequently GGIs that offer the greatest potential influence for NGO participants also stipulate significant criteria that NGOs must meet in order to join. For instance, for FSC membership, NGOs must demonstrate a significant amount of technical expertise in sustainable forest management in order to qualify. In other words, participation in high-­ influence GGIs is often costly for NGOs.

Fig. 4.1  Total NGO participation in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential

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NGO participation in GGIs offering different potential influences may vary across domestic factors: NGOs from richer countries, for example, might spread their participation more evenly across GGIs because resources are not as constrained and more opportunities to participate internationally exist in general. Therefore, we break down these data by domestic factors including income, political regime, and domestic civil society openness. The graphs below display, for our subset of 42 GGIs, the number of NGO participants from countries in different income and political regime categories participating in the GGIs within each level of NGO influence potential (Figs. 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4). While NGOs from all countries are inclined towards initiatives that offer greater potential influence, NGOs from democracies, good domestic civil society environments, and high-income countries seem better able to participate in different types of GGIs than middle- or low-income country NGOs, those from countries with hybrid or autocratic political regimes, and those with less favourable domestic civil society environments. In other words, NGOs from more favourable domestic circumstances

Fig. 4.2  Numbers and proportions of NGOs participating in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential and country income category data taken from the World Bank’s classification of countries into low, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high income based on GDP per capita (World Bank 2018a). To simplify our categories and to make the numbers of countries in each group more comparable, we combined the World Bank ‘lower-middle’ and ‘upper-middle’ categories, leaving us with 56 high-income countries, 96 middle income, and 29 low income

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Fig. 4.3  Numbers and proportions of NGOs participating in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential and political regime. Note: Political regime data taken from the Polity dataset regime classifications for the year 2008, a rough midpoint of our participation data timespan representing the best approximation of the typical regime category of countries over the period. We have collapsed their categories of ‘Anocracy’ (closed and open, which we instead label with the more common term ‘hybrid regimes’) and ‘Democracy’ (regular and full), leaving 83 democracies, 50 hybrid regimes, and 23 autocracies in our data (Marshall et al. 2016)

participate in larger numbers and in a broader range of GGIs, regardless of influence potential. Layering the international and domestic political opportunities structures reveals a few important variations on this general trend. For example, NGOs from countries with hybrid regimes are least likely to participate in medium- or low-influence GGIs. Hybrid regime NGOs participate in high-influence GGIs at rates which suggest efforts at a ‘boomerang effect’ (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Hybrid political systems that are not fully closed—thus allowing for some degree of NGO development but also imposing significant restrictions on advocacy domestically—prompt NGOs to go beyond the domestic arena to make demands. However, these data are not consistent with rates of participation based on the civil

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Fig. 4.4  Numbers and proportions of NGOs participating in GGIs, classified by NGO influence potential and civil society environment

society environment, in which highly favourable domestic environments correlate with greater relative participation in high-authority GGIs. A comparison of these two tables suggests that the context in which NGO capacity develops domestically should be considered separately from regime type as a driver of NGO participation. Democratic regimes still may offer challenging conditions for civil society, while some authoritarian regimes may facilitate NGO capacity as part of a broader co-optation strategy. Meanwhile, NGOs from autocratic regimes have curiously less high-­ influence gravitation than NGOs from democratic regimes. This is possibly due to the small numbers of autocratic regime participants, exaggerating the effect of a few cases. But in some cases, it could mean that in these states, only NGOs supported by their autocratic governments are able to access high-influence GGIs. For example, NGOs from China have begun to participate in force in the UNFCCC climate conferences, following the Chinese government’s recent prioritization of climate change (Henry and Sundstrom 2017). Overall, NGOs from lower-income and less democratic countries are least likely to expend scarce resources on low-influence initiatives, providing further evidence that domestic POS influences international participation patterns in crucial ways.

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Exploring Domestic Influences on NGO GGI Participation While mapping NGO participation in GGIs by potential influence categories suggests that NGOs generally gravitate towards higher-influence GGIs and that there are interesting variations across income, political regime, and civil society environments of countries, there is still significant variation in the aggregate participation rates of NGOs by country within any particular GGI, suggesting that the variation in participation numbers by country may be explained by domestic factors that enhance or constrain NGO capacity and ability to act effectively at home. As outlined earlier, we have chosen to consider the impacts of democracy (measured through the Worldwide Governance Indicators’ Voice and Accountability index (The World Bank 2018a)), economic development (logged GDP/capita (2018b)), and civil society environment (using the V-Dem 8 (2018) Civil Society Participation index) (Coppedge et al. 2018) as domestic elements of political opportunity structure. In order to examine the effects of these variables while holding other factors constant, we have conducted separate linear regression analyses of NGO participation by country-year for two major GGIs. The two institutions chosen include large numbers of participants and offer detailed participation data: the annual COP conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC).6 A closer look at these two GGIs highlights differences in NGO roles that offer high- versus medium-influence potential. As a convention among states, the UNF-CCC (classified as high-influence potential) does not offer opportunities for NGOs to participate directly in the formal negotiation process. Nevertheless, the UNFCCC offers a clear role for 6  The UNGC model uses UNGC data on the year in which non-business actors—global and local NGOs and labour unions, academic institutions, and foundations—joined the UNGC participatory structure, which until 2013 required no continuing commitment to report activities by non-business participants. It excludes 186 organizations which voluntarily withdrew between 2002 and 2017 (email correspondence with UNGC official), but includes those which were expelled for lack of communications per a 2013 rule change. Thus, the data used here differ from that used in Part 1: it is annualized rather than cumulative and includes organizations that had left by the time the Part 1 information was collected. The UNF-CCC data counts the number of NGOs per country sending delegates to the annual Conference of Parties (COP), as reported in the annual COP list of delegates. These data match exactly the data structure in Part 1, but the collection years for Part 2 do not include 2017.

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NGO inclusion. Admitted NGOs have official observer status and, as such, can attend most meetings, submit statements, and host side events. NGOs have played a significant role promoting policy options to influence the content of the agreement (Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004; Andonova et al. 2009; Fisher 2010), and some NGOs have participated on state delegations at COP meetings, providing them with expertise and increasing their technical capacity. In contrast, roles for NGOs in the UN Global Compact (classified as medium-influence potential) are more limited to monitoring private actors—the main participants. In the words of its chief architect, John Ruggie, the UNGC is ‘the archetype of voluntarism’ in its efforts to encourage corporate social responsibility and ‘was designed as a learning forum to promote socially responsible practices in the areas of human rights, workplace standards, the environment, and anticorruption’ (Ruggie 2013, pp, xxix–xxx). Firms participating in the UNGC engage in mandatory reporting, which allows NGO to monitor their behaviour informally, holding businesses accountable to the ten principles of the compact. NGOs also may carry out partnerships with businesses to enhance corporate social responsibility and participate in UNGC local networks. In our regression analysis of NGO participation for these two GGIs, we control for logged population size cross-nationally and increasing levels of participation generally over time and include a dummy variable for the USA, a major outlier in the number of NGOs participating in GGIs. We also incorporate issue-specific control variables, including state regulatory quality and government efficiency for the UNGC, since the UNGC is aimed at tackling corporate social responsibility and corrupt practices, and per GDP CO2 emissions and fossil fuel consumption rates for the UNFCCC (European Union Joint Research Hub 2016; The World Bank 2018a, 2018b), with the expectation that a country’s contribution to global climate change is likely to affect the frequency with which NGOs from that country participate in UNFCCC conferences.7 The regression is performed with robust standard errors upon country-year panel data (Table 4.1).

7  The model for the UNFCCC also adds two variables related to the GGI itself, rather than the issue addressed: the year 2009 as an outlier in delegate numbers and ‘UNFCCC host’ to signify a greater number of NGOs from the state hosting the COP that year. See Appendix 3 for full details of all variables used.

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Table 4.1  Regression results for NGO participation by country in the UNGC and UNFCCC Variable type

Explanatory

WGI Voice and Accountability

Explanatory

V-Dem CS Particip. (aggregate) Log GDP per capita

UNGC (2002–2012)

UNFCCC (2005–2014)

Coef. (Std. Err.)

P

Coef. (Std. Err.)

P

1.0394

0.014

2.4451

0

Control (institution)

Year 2009

(0.628) − 2.899 (1.257) 2.974 (0.9929) 0.2034 (0.0953) 1.7941 (0.3812) 96.1801 (2.67) 2.552

Control (institution)

FCCC Host

(0.788) 12.9087

0.013

Control (institution)

Per GDP CO2

(5.189) 0.0056

0

Control (institution) Control (institution) Control (institution)

Fossil Fuel Consumption WGI Government Efficiency WGI Regulatory Quality

Explanatory

Control (general) Year Control (general) Log Population Control (general) USA

Constant N Est. R2

(0.423) − 2.104 (1.246) 1.671 (0.6405) 0.0112 (0.0376) 1.026 (0.2222) 32.149 (1.568)

− 1.048 (0.487) 0.5405 (0.3955) − 244.209 (74.38) 2142 0.4022

0.061 0.009 0.003 0 0

(0.0013) − 0.042 (0.0106) 0.032 0.175

0.001 1325 0.6494

0.021 0.003 0.033 0 0 0.001

0.02

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Statistical analysis confirms and extends our hypotheses in several ways. For the domestic POS, we find that the influence of the level of democracy on NGO participation in GGIs is significant and positive across both initiatives, indicating that the greater citizens’ ability to exercise voice and hold their governments accountable inside a country, the more the country’s NGOs are likely to participate in GGIs. For every point increase in the WGI Voice and Accountability score (which ranges from −2.5 to 2.5), approximately 1 or 2.4 more NGOs per country can be expected to participate in the UNGC and UNFCCC, respectively [while mean total participation per country is 1.6 and 2.5 NGOs, respectively (Appendix D)]. Democracy at home encourages NGOs’ GGI participation, likely by offering the freedom of movement and expression necessary to engage in transnational advocacy activities. However, the aggregate V-Dem measure of the quality of domestic civil society participatory environment—including ease of NGO consultation, gender equality in civil society, levels of citizen participation in civil society organizations, and citizens’ and NGOs’ ability to affect political candidate selection—is negatively correlated with NGO participation in these GGIs, albeit at only a weak level of significance in one model. At least for these two large initiatives with medium and high-influence potential for NGOs, and focusing narrowly on cross-national variation of participation within them, a more favourable opportunity structure at home—including more consultation with the state and greater opportunities for participation domestically—for NGOs may lead to lower engagement in GGIs. This tentative finding supports a central tenet of the boomerang model in which NGOs facing a constrained POS for achieving their advocacy goals domestically are more likely to seek global venues to achieve their goals. However, the size of the effect is smaller than that of the Voice and Accountability measure of democracy: a one-point increase in the CS participation score, which is the whole range of the measure, correlates with only 2.1 or 2.9 fewer NGOs, respectively.8 Second, we explore how resource availability may influence NGO participation in GGIs. Per capita income is positively correlated with participation in both institutions, at 1.7 and nearly 3 more NGOs per 1% increase in logged GDP per capita. We urge caution in the interpretation of our 8  We are aware of potential issues with multicollinearity among our independent variables, particularly those for domestic POS. For a full account of correlations and stepwise regressions to investigate further, see Appendix 5.

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resource access variables: while GDP per capita offers a broad measure of wealth, it is likely too crude an indicator to convey resource availability for NGOs in a given domestic context, given inequality of resource distribution (Osberg and Sharpe 2002; Stiglitz et  al. 2017). In addition, other types of hard-to-measure resources may be at play, including useful contacts with relevant state officials, domestic laws that support charitable giving, and robust, cooperative networks among NGOs at home.9 We suspect that some of the differences in NGO participation above or below expectations in particular GGIs, and the differences in the dataset as a whole, may be predicated upon particular features of the state–society relationship which drive participation in different types of GGIs, or issue-­ specific concerns of that state’s government, population, or private economic actors. Like Hanegraaff et al. (Hanegraaff et al. 2015), we propose that different types of interest intermediation, which may not be captured in simpler measures of civil society strength or government openness, may shift the incentive structure for NGOs to go global. This is an important issue for future research.

Conclusion and Directions for Future Research NGO participation is an essential precursor to their influence inside GGIs. GGI design appears to play a significant role in encouraging or discouraging participation by NGOs and thus influences whose interests are represented at the global level. We have taken initial steps in this paper to map global POS by categorizing NGO access and governance roles across a wide range of GGIs. We find that GGIs that offer higher potential influence for NGOs, represented by a more consequential set of roles within GGIs, do indeed attract greater participation in general. In future analysis, it would be fruitful to gather more specific systematized data on the quality and depth of NGO participation, to go beyond the basic questions of whether NGOs are drawn to certain levels and categories of roles and instead measure how institutionalized and substantive their roles are—that is, where they actually possess influence over decisions, as opposed to either mere pro forma input exercises or GGIs’ ad hoc engagement of sympathetic NGOs.

9  See Appendix 6 for analyses of different variables representing other potential sources of or impediments to NGO participation in GGIs.

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At the same time, characteristics of the domestic POS shape NGOs’ ability to participate in GGIs. We have demonstrated some tendencies of NGOs from sets of countries grouped by income level and regime type to participate in higher or lower numbers in GGIs offering them different levels of potential influence. Further, through a more detailed analysis of NGO participation by country of origin in the UNFCCC and UNGC, we have further demonstrated the importance of several country-level economic and political factors in shaping domestic NGO capacity to participate in GGIs. Identifying available indicators such as level of democracy, economic development, and civil society participatory environment as significant, albeit blunt, predictors of participation in two major GGIs is a first step in investigating the effects of domestic political opportunity environment. However, this statistical analysis suggests that other domestic factors closely related to NGO consultation and resource availability likely play a role as well—factors which may or may not be captured by existing quantitative measures and which may vary significantly even across states of the same regime type or wealth. In order to further the interaction of approaches in IR and comparative politics to examine interest group participation in GGIs, we propose that scholars of GGIs make more nuanced use of comparative work that goes beyond regime type to look at NGO regulation, civil society strength, and state–society relations. A full exploration of these questions requires a variety of methodological approaches, including qualitative case studies, focused comparisons, and large-N statistical analyses. Acknowledgements  The authors wish to thank Jennifer Allan for access to her UNFCCC participant dataset for 2006–2011, and Fabio Resmini for data research assistance. We are grateful to Elizabeth Bloodgood, Lisa Dellmuth, and all participants at the international workshop on interest groups and INGOs hosted at Stockholm University, June 11–12, 2018, for their helpful feedback, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive suggestions. We also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously funding this research through an Insight Development Grant (#430-2013-000379).

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Appendix A: Overview of NGO Potential Influence on Rankings and Measures Initiatives were scored on the potential influence NGOs could be having in a global governance institution through roles related to decision-­ making or accountability mechanisms, with ‘points’ assigned to each role as follows, and categorization of GGIs as ‘high’ potential influence if the roles totalled 3.5 points or higher; ‘medium’ if totalling 2.5–3 points; and ‘low’ if totalling 0.5–2.0 points. Basic Access Being a signatory of an agreement or listed as a member is an indication that an NGO is considered to hold similar standing in the GGI as other types of members (such as corporations or even government actors), so we assigned a full point for each of these roles. In contrast, being an ‘observer’ means that NGOs are not considered members with equal rights of full parties; for instance, they cannot vote on decisions made. Thus, we assigned ‘observer’ roles for NGOs only ½ point. • Signatory of convention/agreement for GGI (1 point) • Appears on registry of ‘members’ (1 point) • Appears on registry of ‘observers’ (1/2 point). Consultation or Monitoring Roles Having gained access to a GGI, NGOs may play a variety of governance roles that contribute to their potential influence. The ability to attend regular meetings, no matter what the membership status, is an important substantive role that offers potential influence for NGOs, so we assigned this role a full point. NGOs often place a role in promoting accountability, either through formal monitoring within the GGI (one point) or through more informal naming and shaming (1/2 point). NGOs may also carry out ongoing projects or hold one-time events sanctioned by the GGI (one point each). Finally, NGO shapes rules and standards though offering comment and feedback, providing technical expertise, or facilitating stakeholder engagement (one point each).

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• Attends regular meetings (1 point) • Monitors formally compliance or auditing compliance (1 point) • Promotes accountability informally (1/2 point) • Carries out projects under auspices of GGI (1 point) • Hosts an affiliated event (1 point) • Provides comment or feedback on rules and standards (1 point) • Provides technical expertise (1 point) • Facilitates in stakeholder engagement (1 point). Indicator

Measures

Typical website sections

Evaluation of evidence

Basic access

Institutional commitment to NGOs’ role in advancing the initiative Mechanisms for NGO participation

Homepage About Us Vision/mission/goals Background/history Partners/stakeholders

Evidence evaluated nominally as follows: Yes No

How we work Structure Governance Participating organizations Background/history How we work Implementation Action Projects/activities Campaigns partners Participating organizations Members Supporting Organizations

Categories of roles identified by GGI: signatory of convention/ agreement Membership privileges Observer/ supporter privileges Attendance at annual meeting Host a side event Comment on rules/ standards Offer technical expertise Formal monitoring/ auditing Informal monitoring related to GGI transparency initiatives Projects executed under auspices of GGI Consult as stakeholder receive funding

Roles played by NGOs

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Appendix B: Dataset List of 126 Global Governance Initiatives   1. Caux Round Table Principles for Business   2. Clarkson Principles for Stakeholder Management   3. An Interfaith Declaration: Code of Ethics on International Business for Christians, Muslims and Jews   4. Global Sullivan Principles for Social Responsibility   5. GoodCorporation Standard   6. IFC Performance Standards on Social and Environmental Sustainability   7. ISO-26000 Guidance on Corporate Social Responsibility   8. OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises   9. Principles for Global Corporate Responsibility 10. United Nations Global Compact 11. Global Reporting Initiative 12. Basel Convention on Hazardous Waste 13. CERES Roadmap for Sustainability 14. ISO 14000 Environmental Management 15. UNFCCC 16. Stockholm Convention 17. International Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement 18. International Coral Reef Initiative 19. World Commission on Dams 20. Carbon Disclosure Project 21. IISD Bellagio Principles 22. Earth Charter 23. ICC Business Charter for Sustainable Development 24. Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development 25. Rio Declaration on Environment and Development 26. Millennium Development Goals 27. ETI Base Code 28. Fair Labour Association Workplace Code of Conduct 29. ILO Core Labour Declarations 30. ILO Declaration on MNEs and Social Policy 31. Social Accountability International 32. Workers’ Rights Consortium 33. Verite Research, Consulting, Assessment and Training 34. Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI) 35. FairWear Foundation Labour Standards 36. UN CEDAW and Beijing Declaration Conferences 37. Calvert Women’s Principles 38. UN Global Compact Women’s Empowerment Principles 39. International Corporate Governance Network Principles 40. OECD Principles for Corporate Governance (continued)

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(continued) 41. Principles for CG in the Commonwealth 42. International Accounting Standards Board 43. Basel Committee on Banking Supervision 44. Basel Statement on Prevention of Money Laundering 45. Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering 46. Wolfsberg Anti-Money Laundering Principles 47. APEC Course of Action on Corruption and Transparency 48. Partnering Against Corruption Initiative 49. IMF Code, Manual and Guide on Fiscal and Resource Revenue Transparency 50. ICC Rules of Conduct to Combat Extortion and Bribery 51. OECD Anti-Bribery Convention 52. OAS Inter-American Convention Against Corruption 53. Transparency International Business Principles for Countering Bribery 54. UN Convention Against Corruption 55. Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes 56. UN Code of Conduct for Public Officials 57. Amnesty International Human Rights Principles for Companies 58. Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights 59. UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights 60. ICC Marketing Codes 61. Apparel Industry Partnership Workplace Code of Conduct and Principles of Monitoring 62. Clean Clothes Campaign 63. Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production Principles 64. Responsible Care 65. EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports 66. US Defense Industry Initiative on Business Ethics and Conduct 67. Arms Trade Treaty 68. International Stability Operations Association Code of Conduct 69. International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC) 70. Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition Code of Conduct 71. Global e-Sustainability Initiative 72. Council for Responsible Jewelry Practices Code of Conduct 73. Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative 74. International Council on Mining and Metals Sustainable Development Principles 75. International Gas Union Guiding Principles for Sustainable Development 76. Kimberly Process 77. Collevecchio Declaration on Financial Institutions 78. Equator Principles 79. Statement of Environmental Commitment by the Insurance Industry 80. UN Principles for Responsible Investment 81. UNEP FI Statement on the Environment and Sustainable Development 82. Financial Stability Board 83. Group of 20 84. International Association of Insurance Supervisors 85. International Competition Network 86. Joint Forum (continued)

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(continued)   87. World Bank Inspection Panel   88. FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries   89. Marine Stewardship Council   90. WHO/UNICEF International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes   91. WHO Strategy on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs)   92. The Framework for Responsible Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverage Marketing Communications   93. 4C (Common Code for the Coffee Community) Association Code of Conduct for the Coffee Sector   94. International Cocoa Initiative   95. Codex Alimentarius   96. Forest Stewardship Council   97. WHO Strategy on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs)   98. The Framework for Responsible Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverage Marketing Communications   99. 4C (Common Code for the Coffee Community) Association Code of Conduct for the Coffee Sector 100. The Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) 101. UN Forest Principles 102. International Road Transport Union Charter for Sustainable Development 103. International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Associations Code of Practice 104. WHO Ethical criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion 105. International Conference on the Harmonization of Technical Requirements for the Registration of Pharmaceutical Products 106. Good Weave International (formerly Rugmark) 107. FIFA Code of Labour Practice for the Production of FIFA trademark footballs 108. World Federation of Sporting Goods Industry Model Code of Conduct 109. International Council of Toy Industries Code of Conduct 110. World Steel Industry Sustainable Development Vision and Goals 111. Charter for Environmental Action in the Hotel Industry 112. Global Code of Ethics in Tourism 113. World Charter for Sustainable Tourism 114. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 115. UN Aids 116. International Partnership for Microbicides 117. International Aids Society 118. Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) 119. Global Polio Eradication Initiative 120. Global Partnership for a Malaria-Free World (Roll Back Malaria) 121. Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria 122. Stop TB Partnership 123. Drugs For Neglected Diseases 124. Framework Convention Alliance 125. International Health Partnership and IHP+ 126. UNITAID

13. Global Coffee Platform

12. Framework Convention Alliance

Multistakeholder Initiatives Voluntary Regulations

Voluntary Regulations

Voluntary Regulations

10. Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative 11. Forest Stewardship Council

9. Ethical Trading Initiative

8. Earth Charter

Voluntary Regulations Multistakeholder Initiatives Multistakeholder Initiatives Multistakeholder Initiatives Voluntary Regulations

5. Codex Alimentarius 6. Collevecchio Declaration on Financial Institutions 7. Drugs For Neglected Diseases

4. Clean Clothes Campaign

Finance and investment Cross-cutting

Manufacturing, resources, retail

Initiative

Sustainable Development, Environment, Human Rights Labour Rights Manufacturing, resources, retail Public Health, Commerce Public sector Sustainable Development Finance and investment Public Health Health and pharmaceuticals Sustainable Development, Cross-cutting Environment, Human Rights Labour Rights Manufacturing, resources, retail Sustainable Development, Manufacturing, Environment, Human Rights resources, retail Environment Manufacturing, resources, retail Public Health, Sustainable Public sector Development Sustainable Development, Manufacturing, Environment, Labour Rights resources, retail

Gender

Multistakeholder Initiatives Multistakeholder Initiatives Voluntary Regulations

3. Caux Round Table Principles for Business

Labour Rights

Voluntary Regulations

1. Apparel Industry Partnership Workplace Code of Conduct and Principles of Monitoring 2. Calvert Women’s Principles

Themes addressed

Type

Initiative

13

1

8

Themes addressed

277

219

9

Medium 10

High

High

Low

Medium 21

Medium 84

Medium 12

Medium 147 Low 99

Medium 106

Low

Low

Low

Type

Appendix C: Global Governance Institutions with Available NGO Participation Data

96  L. A. HENRY ET AL.

Voluntary Regulations Multistakeholder Initiatives Voluntary Regulations

Multistakeholder Initiatives Multistakeholder Initiatives Voluntary Regulations

Voluntary Regulations

Transgovernmental Networks 28. OAS Inter-American Convention Against Transgovernmental Corruption Networks

27. Millennium Development Goals

26. Marine Stewardship Council

20. International Code of Conduct for Multistakeholder Private Security Service Providers (ICoC) Initiatives 21. International Coral Reef Initiative Multistakeholder Initiatives 22. International Health Partnership and Multistakeholder IHP+ Initiatives 23. International Partnership for Multistakeholder Microbicides Initiatives 24. Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Transgovernmental Development Networks 25. Kimberly Process Voluntary Regulations

19. International Cocoa Initiative

17. GoodCorporation Standard 18. IISD Bellagio Principles

16. Global Reporting Initiative

15. Global Polio Eradication Initiative

14. Global e-Sustainability Initiative

High

Medium 13

Health and pharmaceuticals Cross-cutting

Sustainable Development, Environment Sustainable Development, Human Rights, Environment Environment, Sustainable Development Gender, Sustainable Development, Public Health Economic regulation, Commerce

High

Public sector

High High

31

14

22

(continued)

456

383

15

Medium 12

Manufacturing, resources, retail Manufacturing, resources, retail Cross-cutting

Low

High

Medium 22

Cross-cutting

Environment

Security

Public Health, Sustainable Development Public Health

1 8

64

2

10

Medium 7

Low Low

Low

Low

Low

Manufacturing, resources, retail Defence and Military Public sector

Cross-cutting Cross-cutting

Cross-cutting

Cross-cutting

ICT

Labour Rights

Sustainable Development, Environment, Labour Rights Labour Rights, Environment Sustainable Development

Public Health

Sustainable Development

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Voluntary Regulations Transgovernmental Networks Multistakeholder Initiatives Multistakeholder Initiatives Transgovernmental Networks Transgovernmental Networks Transgovernmental Networks Transgovernmental Networks Multistakeholder Initiatives Voluntary Regulations

29. Social Accountability International

30. Stockholm Convention

37. UN Global Compact Women’s Empowerment Principles 38. UN Principles for Responsible Investment

36. UN Forest Principles

35. UN FCCC

34. UN Convention Against Corruption

32. Transparency International Business Principles for Countering Bribery 33. UN Aids

31. Stop TB Partnership

Type

Initiative

(continued)

Manufacturing, resources, retail Cross-cutting Finance and investment

Environment, Human Rights, Labour Rights

Public sector

Environment, Sustainable Development Gender

Environment

Commerce

Public sector

Cross-cutting

Public Health

Commerce

Health and pharmaceuticals Cross-cutting

Manufacturing, resources, retail Public sector

Initiative

Public Health

Labour Rights, Human Rights Environment

Themes addressed

1316

88

26

Themes addressed

50

1769

41

Low

32

Medium 9

Low

High

Low

Medium 47

Medium 115

High

High

Low

Type

98  L. A. HENRY ET AL.

Voluntary Regulations

40. Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights 41. WHO Strategy on Non-­Communicable Diseases (NCDs) 42. Wolfsberg Anti-Money Laundering Principles Transgovernmental Networks Multistakeholder Initiatives

Voluntary Regulations

39. United Nations Global Compact

Economic regulation, Commerce

Finance and investment

Sustainable Development, Cross-cutting Environment, Human Rights Human Rights, Security Manufacturing, resources, retail Public Health Public sector Low

Low

1

113

Medium 13

Medium 1842

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Appendix D: Variables Included in Descriptive Statistics and Regression Models See Table 4.2. Table 4.2  Bold rows are those used in models which appear only in the appendix Variable

Definition

Range/mean/ median in our observations

Source

Dependent Variable

# of CSOs per country participating in the UNFCCC or joining the UNGC in any given year. While the UNFCCC does not code its non-governmental delegations by organization type, the UNGC does. Included in our basic model are global and local NGOs, academia, foundations, and global and local labour unions. Alternative models of the UNGC regression which restrict the dataset to NGOs only and include business associations can be found below Aggregate score of ‘perceptions of the extent to which a country’s citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media’ Perceptions of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence

UNGC: 0–48 (Spain 2012) UNFCCC: 0–179 (USA 2009) Mean UNGC: 1.596865 Median UNGC: 0 Mean UNFCCC: 2.492315 Median UNFCCC: 0

UNGC and UNFCCC

WGI Voice and Accountability

WGI Rule of Law

− 2.5 (worst World Bank, possible) to 2.5 Governance (best possible) Indicators Mean: −.1708929 Median: −.1829799 − 2.5 (worst possible) to 2.5 (best possible) Mean: −.1842 Median: −.4116

World Bank, Governance Indicators

(continued)

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Table 4.2 (continued) Variable

Definition

Range/mean/ median in our observations

WGI Government Efficiency

Aggregate score of ‘perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies’ Aggregate score of ‘perceptions of the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development’ Are major CSOs routinely consulted by policymakers; how large is the involvement of people in CSOs; are women prevented from participating; and is legislative candidate nomination within party organization highly decentralized or made through party primaries? Does the government attempt to repress civil society organizations (CSOs)?

− 2.5 (worst World Bank, possible) to 2.5 Governance (best possible) Indicators Mean: −.117984 Median: −.3166342

WGI Regulatory Quality

V-Dem Civil Society Participation index

V-Dem Civil Society Repression PolityIV Score

Source

− 2.5 (worst World Bank, possible) to 2.5 Governance (best possible) Indicators Mean: −.1217828 Median: −.2641241 0 (none) to 1 (perfect). Mean: 0.6864476 Median: 0.7408906

V-Dem 8.0

− 3.5 (worst) to 3.5 V-Dem 8.0 (best) Mean: 1.037 Median: 1.258 What is the country’s aggregate Range: − 10 PolityIV Project level of democracy? (complete authoritarian system) to 10 (full democracy) (continued)

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Table 4.2 (continued) Variable

Definition

NGO law suppressing foreign financing?

Is there a particular law regulating or suppressing the foreign financing of NGOs? This might skew the results based purely on ODA Freedom House ‘The civil liberties questions are Civil Liberties grouped into four subcategories: Freedom of Expression and Belief (4 questions), Associational and Organizational Rights (3), Rule of Law (4), and Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights (4)’ Year Year

Log Population Logged Country population

Range/mean/ median in our observations

Source

0 (no) or 1 (yes)

Dupuy et al. (2016)

1 (free) to 7 (not free)

Freedom House 2018

Whole database: 2000–2016 2002–2012 (UNGC tested) or 2005–2015 (UNFCCC tested) Continuous variable Min Pop: 9420 (Tuvalu 2000) Max Pop: 1.38e + 09 (China 2016) Mean Pop : 3.40e + 07 Median Pop : 6766103

World Bank, Development Indicators

(continued)

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Table 4.2 (continued) Variable

Definition

Log GDP per capita

Logged Country GDP per Continuous capita (original in current US$) variable Min GDPpc: 80.45724 (Burundi 2003) Max GDPpc: 187,649.8 (Monaco 2014) Mean GDPpc: 12,872.93 Median GDPpc: 3861.916 ODA, OOF flows, Equity Continuous Investments, and Export variable Credits, 1946–2013 (where Min: − 1102273 available), in US$ at the time (Kiribati 2009) Max: 1.24e09 (Brazil 2001) Mean: 2.39e07 Median: 2679159 Net Overseas Development Aid Continuous received (loan disbursements variable and grants minus repayments Min: − 947 million of loan principal), collected by (Thailand 2003) the OECD. We assume that Max: 2.21 billion Aid is already somewhat scaled US$ (Iraq 2005 to population size by donors, Mean: 347 million as well as being a finitely US$ distributed object (unlike GDP Median: 89.9 per capita, which assumes million US$ resource change across broad sectors of society), thus allowing us to use the pure number rather than one calculated per capita

Civil Society-­ Specific Aid

Net ODA (current US$)

Range/mean/ median in our observations

Source

World Bank, Development Indicators

AidData

World Bank, Development Indicators

(continued)

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L. A. HENRY ET AL.

Table 4.2 (continued) Variable

Definition

Range/mean/ median in our observations

Source

Net ODA per capita

Net Overseas Development Aid received (loan disbursements and grants minus repayments of loan principal), collected by the OECD, as measured against World Bank population estimates What country is it?

Continuous variable Min: − 111.56 Max: 4513.27 Mean: 90.39 Median: 19.90

World Bank, Development Indicators

Is it 2009? (the Copenhagen Accords final negotiations meant a bump in delegates, making this year an outlier in the chronological progression) Is the country a current host of the UNFCCC COP? The annual meeting travels, suggesting more NGOs from the host state CO2 emission totals (in kilotons) of fossil fuel use and industrial processes per IMF/ WEO data of GDP (expressed in 1000 US dollar adjusted to the Purchasing Power Parity of 2011)

0 (no) or 1 (yes)

Country Dummies Year 2009

FCCC Host

Per GDP CO2

Fossil Fuel Consumption

% of a country’s total energy consumption which comes from fossil fuels

0 (no) or 1 (yes)

0 (no) or 1 (yes)

UNFCCC

Continuous variable Min: 0.028133 (Cape Verde 2008) Max: 662.357 (North Korea 2006) Mean: 3.148409 Median: 0.2256545 0–100 Mean: 64.5516 Median: 74.30399

Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)

World Bank, Development Indicators

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Appendix E: Correlations Between Independent Variables Logged GDP per capita and WB Voice and Accountability: 0.6450 Logged GDP per capita and logged population: − 0.2560 Logged GDP per capita and World Bank ODA (all countries): −.3370 WB Voice and Accountability and World Bank ODA (all countries): − 0.2613 V-Dem CS Participatory and V-Dem CS Repression: 0.8372 WB Voice and Accountability and V-Dem CS Participation: 0.7950 WB Voice and Accountability and V-Dem CS Repression: 0.8538 As is shown above, some of our independent variables are highly correlated, as we would expect them to be. Namely, our domestic opportunity structures variables tend to covary: they reflect the same general tendencies. Voice and Accountability and logged GDP per capita are 64% correlated; however, we feel there is no problem testing them within the same model, as it is quite common. We expect some multicollinearity here, as the underlying factors which shape the VaA score probably also influence the relative freedom of the economy and thus the country’s ability to grow rich, but not a perfect set of causal processes leading from one to the other. Logged GDP per capita and logged population are not highly correlated, and neither are Voice and Accountability and Official Development Aid, posing no problem for our models. Our resource variables (logged GDP per capita and World Bank ODA) are also not highly correlated. Therefore, the only potential issue is with the governance variables. In order to see if these correlations among our governance variables influence the model, we use comparative and stepwise analyses. Given that only the governance variables are correlated, the stepwise comparison leaves the resources variables in the model.

N Est. R2

Constant

Fossil fuel consumption

Per GDP CO2

FCCC Host

Year 2009

USA

Log population

WGI Voice and Accountability V-Dem CS Particip. (aggregate) V-Dem CS repression Log GDP per capita World Bank Net ODA (millions) Year

(.0113) − 317.652 (168.86) 1407 .6354

4.8197 (1.1371) − 9.4e–5 (.00002) 0.1392 (.0851) 1.5955 (.3508) 97.271 (2.511) 2.4519 (0.7562) 13.05597 (5.2037) .0038 (.0009) −.0508 12.9312 (5.1973) .006 (.0013) −.0396

3.1046 (.9722) −.0001 (.0002) .1936 (.0939) 1.7685 (.3867) 95.9514 (2.69)

(.0103) .06 − 424.026 (186.89) 1325 .6498

.000

.000

.012

.001

.000

.000

.102

.637

.000

1.809 (.5399)

.023

.000

.000

.013

.000

.000

.039

.612

.001

.001

P

Coef. (Std. Err.)

Coef. (Std. Err.)

P

UNFCCC (Governance 1a)

UNFCCC (no governance)

(.0105) − 334.642 (173.61) 1356 .6424

4.4853 (1.053) −.00011 (.0002) .1461 (.0873) 1.7289 (.3827) 96.3583 (2.7113) 2.4974 (.7694) 13.0371 (5.2064) .0048 (.0012) −.0438

(1.2778)

2.4564

Coef. (Std. Err.)

.054

.000

.000

.012

.001

.000

.000

.094

.583

.000

.055

P

UNFCCC (Governance 1b)

(.0105) − 445.994 (190.86) 1325 .6497

2.9046 (.9791) −.0001 (.0002) .2057 (.0961) 1.8084 (.3875) 96.1376 (2.6838) 2.5497 (.7881) 12.9027 (5.1943) .0055 (.0013) −.0422

(1.222)

2.4315 (.625) − 2.8153

Coef. (Std. Err.)

.019

.000

.000

.013

.001

.000

.000

.032

.657

.003

.021

.000

P

UNFCCC (Governance 2a)

(.0103) − 424.140 (185.90) 1324 .6499

−.03054 (.306) 3.0938 (.9427) −.0011 (.0002) .1937 (.0932) 1.7686 (.3866) 95.9536 (2.682) 2.5562 (.7863) 12.9318 (5.2018) .00598 (.0014) −.0396

1.8508 (.7026)

Coef. (Std. Err.)

.023

.000

.000

.013

.001

.000

.000

.038

.001

.001

.920

.008

P

UNFCCC (Governance 2b)

(.0105) − 449.511 (194.728) 1325 .6484

(1.981) 0.2582 (.4317) 2.9609 (.9535) −.0009 (.0002) 0.2074 (.098) 1.8207 (.3865) 96.1449 (2.6973) 2.5433 (.7844) 12.8887 (5.1947) 0.0058 (.0014) − 0.0425

2.2363 (.6641) − 3.5307

Coef. (Std. Err.)

UNFCCC (Governance 3)

.021

.000

.000

.013

.001

.000

.000

.034

.655

.002

.533

.075

.001

Stepwise Model Building: UNFCCC and Governance. Model 2a is used in the main body of the chapter. 106  L. A. HENRY ET AL.

N Est. R2

WGI Govern ment Effectiveness WGI Regulatory Quality Constant

USA

Log Population

WGI Voice and Account-ability V-Dem CS Particip. (aggregate) V-Dem CS repression Log GDP per capita World Bank Net ODA (millions) Year

.0936 (.0358) .9395 (.2116) 32.3116 (1.5234) −.7778 (.4596) .6399 (.3809) − 208.512 (70.75) 2142 .3955

1.9692 (.6958) .0001 (.0002)

.003

.093

.091

.000

.000

.009

.604

.005

.0987 (.0348) .9879 (.2166) 32.053 (1.5649) −.9523 (.4906) .4592 (.3992) − 219.004 (68.89) 2142 .4065

1.8384 (.6445) .00009 (.0002)

.6328 (.3254)

.001

.250

.052

.000

.000

.005

.630

.004

.052

P

Coef. (Std. Err.)

Coef. (Std. Err.)

P

UNGCC (Governance 1a)

UNGC (no governance)

.0955 (.0371) .9383 (.2138) 32.399 (1.5625) −.7628 (.4602) .6851 (.3924) − 211.8238 (72.981) 2142 .3920

1.9496 (.6983) .00011 (.0002)

−.5282 (.8739)

Coef. (Std. Err.)

.081

.097

.000

.000

.010

.591

.005

.546

P

UNGCC (Governance 1b)

.1091 (.0367) 1.0048 (.2197) 32.2324 (1.5689) − 1.0126 (.492) .5286 (.3998) − 238.1072 (72.49) 2142 .4020

1.6961 (.6409) .00011 (.0002)

1.0415 (.4224) − 2.2015 (1.1672)

Coef. (Std. Err.)

Coef. (Std. Err.)

.001

.186

.040

.000

.000

.003

.575

.008

.09856 (.0346) .9876 (.2167) 32.023 (1.5640) −.9451 (.4821) .45597 (.3912) − 218.7476 (68.597) 2142 .4064

.02505 (.2421) 1.8422 (.6436) .00009 (.0002)

.014 .60075 (.4395) .059

P

Coef. (Std. Err.)

.001

.244

.050

.000

.000

.004

.11088 (.0376) 1.0090 (.2205) 32.2598 (1.5731) − 9625 (.4818) .5161 (.3988) − 241.5179 (74.125) 2142 .4002

.172 .8637 (.4464) − 2.8384 (1.5345) .918 .2352 (.2932) .004 1.6863 (.6419) .634 .00011 (.0002)

P

UNGC (Governance UNGC (Governance UNGC 2a) 2b) (Governance 3)

Stepwise Model Building: UNGC and Governance. Model 2a is used in the main body of the chapter

.001

.196

.046

.000

.000

.003

.579

.009

.423

.064

.053

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Analysis: As is shown above, even though the two V-Dem variables covary at a rate of 0.8372, they have very different coefficients in the overall models (UNF-CCC and UNGC). While the CS Participatory Environment model (Governance 2a) changes the coefficient of the World Bank Voice and Accountability variable and introduces a negative effect— higher CS participation at home correlates to lower participation abroad— the CS Repression variable (2b) has almost no effect. Not only is it nearly random, but it does little to change either the other coefficients or the estimated R2. However, we test it in a combined model (Governance 3) because (a) repression is considered, separately from the participatory environment, to be a potentially theoretically significant driver of NGO activity and (b) as with ODA, we are responding to earlier reviewer comments. Essentially, the inclusion of the CS repression variable tests more theory while sacrificing the p value on the CS participatory environment variable due to multicollinearity The same trends are represented in the UNGC model as in the UNFCCC model, although the CS participation variable remains significant only at the p  $20 million) have generalist agendas (Table  5.3). Conversely, a large majority (80%) of medium-sized TAGs and ALL (100%) small TAGs adopt narrower, specialist agendas. I also conjectured that resource-rich groups are likely to show a preference for moderate and conventional tactics, whereas resource-poor groups are more prone to use confrontational and unconventional methods (Hypothesis 5). Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that 29 in 30 (97%) of large, resource-rich TAGs use mostly conventional methods, while only 26 in 50 (52%) of small TAGs stick to conventional methods, against 48% that prefer unconventional methods. Finally 27 of 30 (90%) Large TAGs generally choose moderate over confrontational methods, while that number falls to 72% for small-sized TAGs with fewer resources (Table 5.3). My final hypothesis is that older, ‘incumbent’ TAGs are prone to using conventional strategies, while ‘newcomers’ are more likely to be

Total no.

30 10 50

Group size

Large Medium Small

(19) 63% (2) 20% (0) 0%

Generalist (11) 37% (8) 80% (50) 100%

Specialist (25) 83% (8) 80% (19) 38%

Inside

Table 5.3  Distribution of strategies by group size

(5) 17% (2) 20% (31) 62%

Outside (27) 90% (9) 90% (36) 72%

Moderate (3) 10% (1) 10% (14) 28%

Confrontational

(29) 97% (8) 80% (26) 52%

Conventional

(1) 3% (2) 20% (24) 48%

Unconventional

150  M. EILSTRUP-SANGIOVANNI

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151

Table 5.4  Distribution of strategic profiles by group size Group size

Total no.

Profile 1

Profile 2

Profile 3

Profile 4

Profile 5

Profile 6

Large Medium Small

30 10 50

(25) 83% (7) 70% (16) 32%

(0) 0% (1) 10% (3) 6%

(2) 7% (1) 10% (7) 14%

(0) 0% (0) 0% (10) 20%

(2) 7% (0) 0% (3) 6%

(1) 3% (1) 10% (11) 22%

unconventional. Consistent with this expectation I find that 89% (34  in 37) of TAGs founded before 1990 rely primarily on conventional strategies such as inside lobbying and information provision, while only 11% (3 in 37) use unconventional strategies. By contrast, 43% of groups founded after 1990 use predominantly unconventional strategies (this number rises to 50% for TAGs founded after 2000). In general, I find strategic plurality to be considerably greater among the subpopulation of small TAGs (Table 5.4) and among TAGs founded after 1990 (Table 5.2). Case Studies: Individual Organizational Adaptation My population-wide analysis illustrates a wide spectrum of strategic repertoires among environmental conservation TAGs and indicates a noticeable trend towards growing pluralization over time. However, my measure of increasing strategic differentiation is based mainly on the observation that older, incumbent TAGs exhibit relative strategic uniformity insofar as they mostly adopt a generalist role, whereas newcomers often situate themselves on the periphery of the environmental conservation advocacy niche, choosing a specialist role. This broad snapshot fails to capture the extent to which individual TAGs have sought to reinvent themselves over time in response to changing constraints and opportunities within the Niche. To complement my large-n analysis, I therefore provide a set of brief case studies to illustrate how individual TAGs have reacted to growing population-­pressure by distancing themselves from their peers. I thereby demonstrate the link between general population pressures and individual-­ level adaptation. As discussed briefly earlier, a noticeable finding of my empirical analysis is that several large, incumbent environmental organizations have expanded their agendas over time. The WWF (founded 1961) initially focused mainly on protecting single wildlife species. Over time, however, it has expanded

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its mission to include, inter alia, renewable resources, pollution, sustainable finance and development, and food security. Another large group, Greenpeace (f. 1969), has also significantly broadened its agenda from an initial narrow focus on nuclear testing and conservation of marine mammals to a diverse set of issues including climate change, genetically modified organisms, deforestation, trade in high-tech waste, and global poverty (Spiegel 2012). To some extent this is an obvious finding: as advocacy groups grow older and acquire more capacity and expertise, they are able to expand their focus to more issues. Yet, not all incumbent organizations have followed this pattern. For example, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (founded 1969) has retained a narrow focus on animal welfare, thereby avoiding direct competition with large peers such as The WWF and Greenpeace. Similarly, although it has both expanded in size and broadened its agenda, the Wildlife Conservation Society (f. 1895) has remained focused on species conservation and habitat protection, while avoiding issues such as climate change or wildlife trafficking, which might bring it into direct competition with other large Generalists such as The WWF. As expected, growing size and expanding agendas had led to a degree of strategic moderation among large Generalists. During the 1960s, The WWF combined inside lobbying and fundraising with moderate outside strategies such as press conferences, leafleting, education, and support for practical conservation projects around the world. Yet, during the 1970s, as its agenda and resource-base grew, WWF stepped up its engagement with governments and international environmental treaty-making, and built closer ties to the corporate world (WWF-50 years of history). The moderating effects of growing size and wealth are also visible with respect to Greenpeace. During the 1970s, Greenpeace established a reputation for headline-grabbing confrontational strategies designed to capture public attention (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 129; McCormick 2011: 103). In the ‘Don’t Make a Wave’ campaign, Greenpeace sought to stop nuclear tests by sailing a vessel into the US test-site at Amchitka Island. During the 1980s, Greenpeace sent boats into direct clashes with Japanese and Soviet whalers. Since then, however, Greenpeace has grown less confrontational and more willing to work through established political channels (McCormick 2011). Greenpeace suffered widespread reputational damage for its violent campaigns against seal and whale hunting, which were perceived by public in many countries as damaging to vulnerable indigenous communities (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Phelps-Bondaroff 2014). As

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Greenpeace’s global membership has grown to almost 3 million, its strategies have become increasingly more moderate, with a growing focus on political lobbying, scientific evidence, and advising corporations on environmental matters (Pagé 2004). While Greenpeace continues to engage in ‘civil disobedience’ to attract media attention, its outside strategies are mostly limited to banner-hanging and symbolic protest—acts designed to attract media attention and raise public awareness but unlikely to alienate mainstream public audiences or media outlets (McCormick 2011; Pagé 2004). This is consistent with the expectation that large, membershipfunded TAGs use a mix of inside and outside strategies, but find it difficult to sustain a radical agenda (Stroup and Wong 2017). Thus, both Greenpeace and The WWF fit the mould of resource-­rich, incumbent organizations that respond to growing population pressures by adopting a Generalist profile which allows them to benefit from scale-economies (H4 and H5). In sharp contrast to The WWF and Greenpeace, the Sea Shepherds Conservation Society (SSCS) founded in 1977 provides an example of a group that openly eschews moderate tactics such as lobbying or public education, and instead specializes in direct action aimed at monitoring and enforcing environmental laws. Headquartered in Amsterdam, the SSCS operates a fleet of ten ships that sail world’s oceans to combat illegal fishing. The group is notorious for its confrontational actions, which have included ramming and scuttling whaling ships, obstructing seal hunting, and destroying drift nets at sea (Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Phelps-­Bondaroff 2014). The SSCS is relatively resource poor and has no public membership to which it is directly accountable. Moreover, its strategic flexibility is increased by the fact that it receives the bulk of its funding from a small handful of celebrity donors, rather than having to convince large numbers of individuals, or corporations or governments to support its activities. This profile differs sharply from The WWF, and Greenpeace which both have large public memberships and enjoy close ties to policy-­makers and the corporate sector.7 While many established TAGs have expanded their agendas and toned-­ down confrontational strategies, new, smaller groups have emerged with more specialized approaches. An example is the Environmental Justice Foundation (f. 2001) that works internationally to expose illegal fishing 7  WWF gets one-third of its revenue from government and corporation grants (www. worldwildlife.org/ about#).

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and destruction of forests in poor, marginalized communities, using a combination of film, training, and remote sensing technologies. Other examples include the Environmental Investigation Agency that works to expose environmental crime through undercover investigations, and the Wildlife Justice Foundation that also targets transnational organized wildlife crime. All three groups rely on new surveillance technologies, such as drones, GPS, and electronic camera traps, to undertake environmental monitoring and investigation. Other ‘newcomer’ groups—including The Black Fish, Shadow View, and Soar Oceans—also use satellite images and cheap drone technology to expose illegal fishing, while yet others, such as the tiny SkyTruth, have carved out a highly specialized niche as developers of satellite-based surveillance solutions for use by other environmental groups and government resource managers. What these specialist TAGs have in common is that they are all small and resource-poor. All founded in the 2000s, these groups’ profiles further support the notion that newcomers need to be strategically innovative to survive in a crowded marketplace. As Wietse van de Werf, founder of The Black Fish, explains, ‘What is needed now is not another Sea Shepherds or Greenpeace. We are choosing a different approach’ (interview with author, 2016).

Conclusions This chapter has examined how changing opportunity structures, arising from both ecological and institutional developments, influence the strategies of environmental TAGs. I have demonstrated that growing population density has prompted a strategic division of labour, whereby some TAGs (mainly larger and resource-rich groups) specialize in gaining political access and appeal to mainstream audiences, while others (mainly smaller, less well-established groups) focus on developing ‘fringe’ functions. I have further illustrated how this division of labour has been facilitated by legal and technological changes which have expanded the strategic choices available to transnational advocacy groups. At face value, these findings may seem unsurprising: as new institutions and technologies arise, new actors emerge to take advantage of the opportunities they bring. Nonetheless, my findings contradict the prevailing notion that interest groups’ strategic repertoires evolve mainly through processes of social learning or ‘mimetic isomorphism’ whereby groups copy the successful practices of leading peers, resulting in converging repertories and strategic uniformity (Hadden and Jasny 2017; Keck and

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Sikkink 1998; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Wang and Soule 2012: 1677). The advocacy groups examined in this chapter all have similar programmatic goals and operate in a similar political and legal environment. They frequently liaise with one another, providing opportunities for socialization and learning. Nonetheless they behave strategically very differently. Rather than mimicking each other’s strategies, they seek to reduce competition through strategic differentiation. My argument makes several contributions to existing literature on transnational advocacy and suggests new avenues for research. First, conceiving of the issue-spaces in and around which TAGs campaign in terms of discrete population niches defined by limited resources provides a useful complement to IR-based theories of transnational advocacy. By highlighting the effects of population density, ecological theories underscore that other TAGs are not only potential collaborators but also competitors that depend on the same pool of resources (monetary, political, or technical) for their functioning. This aspect is often overlooked in IR literature, which tends to portray TAGs as a relatively homogenous crowd, linking arms to present a united front against states and IOs (Carpenter et al. 2014). In addition to focusing on dynamics of organizational collaboration, scholarship on transitional advocacy should therefore pay closer attention to dynamics of inter-organizational competition. Second, along with a growing strand of IR literature (e.g., Cooley and James 2002; Sell and Prakash 2004; Mitchell and Schmitz 2014; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017; Stroup and Wong 2017; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Sharman, 2022; Tallberg et al. 2018), my analysis highlights how TAGs’ strategic choices are often determined by instrumental goals—such as organizational survival and growth—rather than (or in addition to) purely ‘principled goals’ such as influencing specific substantive policy issues. Whereas instrumental incentives have been explored in terms of how they affect issue-selection by TAGs (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Bob 2005; Carpenter et  al. 2014; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2018), I argue that instrumental incentives also shape more practical tactical and strategic choices about how to influence processes of political decision-making. Third, this chapter has highlighted how TAGs react to and interact with their environments, not only insofar as strategic repertoires are closely shaped by the structure of TAGs’ peer relationships, but also in terms of how groups embrace and exploit new technologies. The impact of new technologies on the nature and effectiveness of transnational advocacy is a

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little explored area to which scholars of transnational advocacy should be encouraged to pay greater attention.

Appendix: ATA and Coding Criteria The Population Tables 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4 contain a list of transnational environmental conservation advocacy groups ordered by Founding Year (Table 5.2) and Size (Tables 5.3 and 5.4). The tables include only group that operates on a global level and whose focus on environmental conservation (animal rights groups with no conservation focus are thus excluded). In line with this edited volume’s focus on political advocacy, I also exclude radical or extremist environmental groups (such as Earth First!) whose embrace of deadly violence against persons means they cannot be seen to engage in political advocacy as defined here. To be included, an organization must be currently active and have a functioning Web site. To build as complete as possible a picture of the overall population, I have used searches of the Yearbook of International Organization (online database) as well as web-links between individual advocacy organizations in order to identify all relevant organizations. Data The data used to code individual entries have been gathered from the Yearbook of International Organizations (online, 2018) and from individual organizational Web sites, Facebook profiles, and LinkedIn pages, as well as from secondary academic literature. Individual Strategies Coded A Awareness raising and information-dissemination CER Certification COR Direct cooperation with companies CPB Capacity building DA Direct Action/Civil Disobedience DIV Divestment campaigns EDU Education and training GOV Close cooperation w. specific governments IM Independent media

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IO L

Close cooperation w. specific international organizations Direct lobbying of governments or international organizations LAW Legal advocacy or consulting LIT Litigation MON/ENF Monitoring and enforcement activities P Protests, rallies, marches, banner-hanging, etc. PCP Practical conservation projects w. local/global stakeholders PE Petitions PR Press conferences, media advertisements R Research and scientific evidence SMC Social media campaigning TECH Development and implementation of high-tech conservation tools Organizational Size Large > $20 million annual revenue, OR > 30 staff, OR > 20 offices worldwide Medium >10 staff, OR > $10 million annual revenue Small < 10 staff, OR < $10 million annual revenue

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PART II

Strategies and Opportunities

CHAPTER 6

Lobbying the Lobbyists: When and Why Do Policymakers Seek to Influence Advocacy Groups in Global Governance? Kirsten Lucas, Marcel Hanegraaff, and Iskander De Bruycker

Introduction Sometimes NGOs are able to say what we (…) are unable to say.1 (policymaker active at UN climate conferences)

K. Lucas (*) Policy and Operations Evaluation Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Hanegraaff Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] I. De Bruycker University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. M. Dellmuth, E. A. Bloodgood (eds.), Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8_6

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Advocacy is typically conceived of as an activity through which advocacy groups seek and policymakers grant influence. This is exemplified by most of the chapters in this edited volume, in which advocacy groups are studied as actors seeking to impact state decisions (Chap. 7) or have an actual impact on political decision-making processes (Chaps. 9, 10, and 11). We argue, and empirically demonstrate, that policymakers, in turn, attempt to influence the issue positions and strategies of advocacy organizations. Our argument especially applies to global advocacy and governance. At the international level, the chances of advocacy groups shaping political agreements tend to be relatively limited (e.g. Lucas 2019; Tallberg et al. 2018). Moreover, advocacy groups often invest in other, more elusive activities, such as promoting the visibility of their own organization (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017; Stroup and Wong 2017), networking with other organizations (Hadden 2015), or monitoring the policymaking process (Hanegraaff et al. 2016). Even when advocacy groups’ main purpose is not to impact state decisions, they can still serve as excellent liaisons between two or more opposing states (Lowery 2007). For instance, advocacy groups may support domestic policymakers by supplying them with relevant expertise and by promoting the state’s political interests to other stakeholders. We thus argue that policymakers are not exclusively on the receiving end of information exchanges with advocacy groups but also reach out to advocacy groups themselves in global governance. The goal of this chapter is to conceptually outline and empirically assess the ‘influence flow’ from policymakers to advocacy groups. Former studies in this tradition have taught us that political institutions can shape the behaviour of advocacy groups (see Bloodgood and Tremblay-Boire 2017; Cooley and Ron 2002; Heylen and Willems 2018; Mahoney 2004; Molenaers et al. 2011; Neumayr et al. 2015; Persson and Edholm 2018; Verschuere and De Corte 2014) and that policymakers pressure these groups into defending policy positions in line with their preferences (Holyoke 2009; Heaney 2006; Heaney and Leifeld 2018; Heaney and Rojas 2015). We build on these findings and seek to explore and explain how policymakers try to shape the policy positions of advocacy groups. We propose two modes of interaction between policymakers and advocacy groups: amplification and persuasion. On the one hand, policymakers can prompt like-minded advocacy groups (allies) to emphasize and amplify their shared policy goals when communicating with other relevant stakeholders. On the other hand, policymakers may seek out advocacy groups with opposing views (opponents) in order to persuade them to alternate

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or soften their position (see Hall and Deardorff 2006). Our objective is to (a) assess the extent to which both amplification and persuasion strategies are employed by policymakers, and (b) explain why some policymakers rely more on amplification while others rely more on persuasion. To explain this variation, we apply insights derived from both the interest group and (international) non-governmental organizations ((I)NGO) literature, as detailed in Chap. 1. We rely on the concept of ‘political opportunity structures’, which is commonly used by social movement and (I)NGO scholars to explain why policymakers reach out to interest group allies or opponents (Finnemore and Sikkink 2007; Kitschelt 1986; Kriesi 1995; Risse et al. 2013). From the interest group literature, we use the ‘resource exchange theory’. This theory supposes that the transfer of resources, such as political support and information, shapes the interactions among policymakers and advocacy groups (Binderkrantz et al. 2014; Bouwen 2002; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Salisbury 1969; Tallberg et al. 2018). Combined, this leads to hypotheses related to the issue context, the institutional environment, and the electoral mandate of the individual policymaker in question (see also Chap. 1). To assess our expectations empirically, we rely on responses from 297 policymakers (diplomats, civil servants, and politicians) from 107 countries during on-the-spot interviews conducted at the Conferences of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Ministerial Conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2015 and 2017. We asked policymakers about how often they interacted with advocacy groups, who initiated these interactions, and what policymakers tried to achieve with these interactions. Our results show that saliency increases the propensity of policymakers to motivate allies to amplify their common position and, at the same time, it elicits them to try and persuade opponents that policymakers from democratically accountable countries are more likely to motivate advocacy groups to more vigorously voice their common position and that elected officials are more likely to persuade advocacy groups to change their position than diplomats and civil servants active at international conferences.

Literature Review: The Other Side of the Coin Over the past decades, many scholars have focussed on the interactions between advocacy groups and policymakers (Bunea and Baumgartner 2014). Most studies have analysed how non-state actors, through their

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interactions with policymakers, attempt to shape policymaking outcomes (Beyers and Hanegraaff 2017; Gullberg 2008). Although this has led to rich insights into how societal interests seek to impact policy decisions, these studies tend to ignore the overall complexity and reciprocity of the relationship between policymakers and non-state actors. This is what Cowles (2003) labels a ‘false dichotomy’, whereby advocacy groups are considered as those trying to exercise influence and policymakers as those being influenced. Hall and Deardorff (2006) also emphasize the strong demand policymakers experience for interest groups’ input, hereby setting the stage for a more nuanced and reciprocal understanding of the relationship between policymakers and lobbyists. Scholars have started to develop this more nuanced understanding by assessing the role of policy context in lobbying processes (Klüver et  al. 2015; Baumgartner et al. 2009; Mahoney 2007). These studies argue that the advocacy activities and policy views of non-state actors are shaped by the overall context in which groups operate, for example, the institutional setting (Klüver et  al. 2015). Others have moved even further and have argued that the relationship between advocacy organizations and policymakers is strongly steered by the behaviour of policymakers (Ainsworth 1993, 1997; Holyoke 2009, 2011; Matthews 1960). There is a large body of literature dealing with how governments affect the behaviour of advocacy groups through government funding and patronage (Bloodgood and Tremblay-Boire 2017; Cooley and Ron 2002; Heylen and Willems 2018; Mahoney 2004; Molenaers et al. 2011; Neumayr et al. 2015; Persson and Edholm 2018; Verschuere and De Corte 2014). Bloodgood and Tremblay-­ Boire (2017), for instance, show that government subsidies can have a dampening effect on the advocacy activities of NGOs, and Heylen and Willems (2018) demonstrate how subsidies steer the choice for advocacy venues. There is a considerable amount of research on how policymakers affect the mobilization of advocacy groups by focussing mostly on government funding and financial dependencies. However, these studies do not analyse the effect of policymakers on the actual issue preferences expressed by advocacy groups. In his article on coalition formation at the US Congress, Holyoke (2009) does take a first step in this direction by showing that advocacy groups require access to policymakers and that the latter use their gate-keeping power to pressure advocacy groups into defending policy positions in line with their preferences. In addition, Heaney and colleagues have shown that the advocacy behaviour of groups is steered by their connections with policymakers

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(Heaney 2006; Heaney and Leifeld 2018; Heaney and Rojas 2015). These studies are important as they highlight the reciprocal impact policymakers and lobbyists have on each other. What is less clear, however, is how exactly policymakers try to impact the advocacy efforts of lobbyists. Our argument—and our contribution to the former literature—is that policymakers have, at least, two distinct options to influence lobbyists. On the one hand, policymakers may actively contact allied advocacy groups to serve as ‘service bureaus’ which provide relevant information and arguments or ask them to rally support for their cause (Crombez 2002; Hall and Deardorff 2006). We label this strategy as ‘amplification’ because it highlights policymakers’ attempts to push lobbyists to openly support their policy positions. On the other hand, a policymaker may contact advocacy groups with opposing views to convince them to change or tone down their position so that it resonates with the policymakers’ objectives. We label this strategy ‘persuasion’, as these actions by policymakers have the intent to persuade lobbyists to change their policy position (Austen-­ Smith and Wright 1994, 1996; Beyers and Hanegraaff 2017; Corell and Betsill 2001; Gulbrandsen and Andresen 2004; Gullberg 2008; Hansen 1991; Kollman 1997; Marshall 2010). Amplification and persuasion are not geared at changing invisible or latent positions and beliefs per se, but rather at changing or activating visible positions which advocacy groups articulate. Policymakers have good reasons to rely on amplification and persuasion. As for amplification, policymakers may approach allied advocacy groups to build broad coalitions, which are a crucial commodity in any policymaking process. Amplification does require advocacy groups to mobilize, but it also implies that policymakers encourage advocacy groups to voice an outspoken position. Rallying advocacy allies can showcase societal support for the policymaker’s goals, thus strengthening the negotiating position of that policymaker. It is of strategic interest to policymakers to foster and consolidate their relationship with non-state actors so that they can mobilize their support base should this be required (Bernhagen and Bräuninger 2005). In addition, policymakers are not always able to publicly express an outspoken position, for example, because they are part of a coalition with other countries. With the help of advocacy organizations that can voice such outspoken positions, policy debates might shift into a direction that is in line with the preferences of the policymaker. Moreover, policymakers may seek out supportive interest organizations in order to acquire trustworthy expertise (Gullberg 2008; Potters and van

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Winden 1992). Policymakers are often generalists and rely on advocacy groups to supply them the (often technical) information which is required during international negotiations (Chalmers 2013a; Klüver 2012). This seems relevant for policymakers at the global level as well. For example, when an international trade regime on export subsidies in agriculture is on the agenda of the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization, a policymaker might consult relevant constituencies and sectors to be aware of the practical implications of the proposals on the table. If policymakers do not have this information at hand, any deal they strike runs the risk of being highly contested in their home country. In addition, policymakers may prioritize their advocacy group allies because these interactions are less costly compared to exchanges with opposing groups. It may be in the interest of the policymaker ‘not to debate with his opponents but to stimulate his friends to act’ (Bauer et al. 1963: 350). Since policymakers have scarce time and resources, they can reduce costs by approaching advocacy groups that support them rather than those with an opposing view. The same goes for persuasion, as policymakers also have incentives to approach advocacy groups which do not a priori agree with them. When the main purpose of policymakers is to expand their support base rather than to consolidate it or to acquire technical information, then there is little to gain from contacting like-minded advocacy groups. Considering the context of international conferences, in which large coalitions among state delegations are a prerequisite to materialize change, a large support base is essential. Policymakers might thus reach out to advocacy groups who publicly articulate arguments against their own view in an effort to alter or moderate the advocacy groups’ stance. More broadly, policymakers have incentives to entertain contacts with those who oppose them on a particular issue simply because these opponents may become allies on another issue (Gullberg 2008: 2964). Interacting with allies may thus contribute to the development and maintenance of a broad policy network (Gullberg 2008: 2969). The rationale behind these strategies is that policymakers seek to expand their tangible support in policy debates. To do so, they pressure interest group allies and opponents to adopt and articulate a position close to their own. This pressure can be coercive, meaning that policymakers threaten to retaliate when interest groups do not comply with their demands. It can also be based on (implicit) promises of gratification, where interest groups are rewarded with access or influence if they conform to the policymaker’s

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request. We presume that these underlying gratification and coercion mechanisms are at play, but do not distinguish between them in our analysis. In this chapter, we aim to explore the extent to which policymakers rely on amplification and persuasion strategies when reaching out to lobbyists. Are they focussing mainly on lobbyists who essentially agree with them to push them to voice their position more outspokenly, or do they mainly reach out to lobbyists to try and persuade them to take a different position? Importantly, however, we do not only want to explore this variation. We also aim to explain why some policymakers rely more on amplification strategies while others rely more on persuasion when communicating with lobbyists. Our expectations regarding this latter question are developed in the next section.

Hypotheses: Amplification or Persuasion As this is, to our knowledge, the first study that analyses the different strategies with which policymakers approach interest groups on specific policy issues, our hypotheses are of an explorative nature and build on research conducted in different research fields (e.g. sociology, international relations) and institutional settings (e.g. within the US or EU). As said, we argue that policymakers try to shape the behaviour of non-state actors by adopting either amplification or persuasion strategies. This highlights the fluidity of political opportunity structures as policymakers themselves can shift and shape these structures through which non-state actors navigate on a specific policy dossier (see Green and Auld 2017; Prakash and Potoski 2014). From resource exchange theory, as developed in organizational sociology (Jacobs 1974; Levine and White 1961; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978) and adapted to study advocacy groups (Binderkrantz et al. 2014; Bouwen 2002; Hansen 1991; Salisbury 1969; Steffek 2013; Tallberg et al. 2018; Wright 1996), we learn that interactions among policymakers and advocacy groups are focussed on the transfer of resources such as political support and information. Given that policymakers only have limited time and resources at their disposal (Beyers and Braun 2014; Hall and Deardorff 2006; Jones and Baumgartner 2005), they are presumed to be selective in which advocacy groups they interact with. We explore whether the choice for reaching out to allies (amplification) or opponents (persuasion) is informed by the policy context in which the policymakers operate the institutional context from which they stem, or is it the result of an individual policymaker’s electoral mandate. We discuss these in turn.

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First, the policy context and, more specifically, the salience of policy issues are consequential for the political pressure policymakers face and the support they seek from societal interests. We define salience as the importance attributed to a policy issue by policymakers (Beyers and Hanegraaff 2017). Issues which are highly salient to policymakers typically attract high levels of advocacy mobilization (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Raustiala 1997; Skjelsbaek 1971). Higher levels of advocacy mobilization in turn generate pressure and a higher diversity of viewpoints that policymakers need to take into consideration. This also means that advocacy groups are more constrained in shifting policies to their preferred outcomes (Klüver 2011; Mahoney 2007). Salience thus affects the interactions between non-state actors and policymakers and the political opportunity structure of advocacy groups (Chap. 1). More precisely, we expect that salience makes policymakers more likely to use both amplification and persuasion. The logic is as follows: policymakers are much more active and consequently experience a relatively higher demand for information and political support on issues that they consider important. Moreover, salient issues attract more advocacy mobilization, which, in turn, leads to an increased supply of information and political support. Therefore, policymakers will more vigorously seek out advocacy groups on salient issues. If policymakers succeed in securing support from opponents and allies, this provides them with the necessary tools to signal the scope of support for their cause and helps them in realizing their preferred policy outcome. H1 Policymakers working on issues which they perceive as more salient are more prone to use both amplification and persuasion strategies towards advocacy groups. Second, the political pressures policymakers face and their need for political support vary depending on the institutional context in which they are embedded. One specific factor of this context is the level of democracy of the country a policymaker hails from (Beckfield 2003; Bernauer et al. 2013; Beyers and Hanegraaff 2017; Dalton et al. 2003; Lee 2010; Smith and Wiest 2005; Tallberg et al. 2014, 2018). In a democracy, policymakers are held accountable to the public through free and fair elections, referenda, and other forms of citizen involvement or activism (such as protests, public deliberations, media campaigns, or consultations). This leads policymakers from democratic polities to place relatively greater

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value on exchanges with opposing interests than policymakers hailing from less democratic countries do. In established democracies, the activities of opposing groups are more consequential for political debates and the political competition is fiercer in comparison with less democratic countries. Based on this reasoning, we expect policymakers hailing from democratic countries to value exchanges with opposing groups more than policymakers from less democratic countries. Not only opponents but also allied groups are expected to be more important for policymakers hailing from democracies. Non-state actor communities in democracies are typically large and are thus an abundant source of technical information and political support (Lohmann 1998). Policymakers in democratic countries cannot exclusively focus on trying to persuade their opponents but should invest more in consolidating and mobilizing allied political support. In less democratic countries, advocacy communities are typically less developed and opponents are often silenced through government control. As a result, policymakers from these countries face less competition when securing societal support, that is, support from the existing (often state-controlled) advocacy group community is obvious and less competitive. Importantly, we do not argue that in democratic states it is easier for advocacy groups to realize policy objectives (Lucas 2019; Risse-Kappen 1995). On the contrary, in this regard Bernauer et al. (2013) even speak of a ‘civil society-democracy paradox’: a higher number of advocacy groups leads to weaker influence of societal interests. Nonetheless, in democracies, the struggle for political support is more intense and the advocacy group communities more developed. This leads democratic policymakers to approach both allies and opponents relatively more often than policymakers coming from less democratic countries. H2 Policymakers hailing from democratic countries are more prone to using both amplification and persuasion compared to policymakers hailing from less democratic countries. Third, whether policymakers rely on amplification and persuasion strategies is contingent not only on the policy and institutional context but also on the political mandate of the policymaker. Policymakers’ strategic choices are informed by the relationship with their constituencies and, more specifically, by whether they are subject to political pressure or electoral retribution from their constituencies. Elected politicians depend on

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public support and are particularly likely to be susceptible to pressure from opposing advocacy groups. Politicians may seek out these advocacy groups because they need to be responsive to political pressures and public demands. Otherwise, they can be penalized through democratic control mechanisms (such as elections or protest) (Heaney 2006; Kollman 1998; Schattschneider 1960). A wide variety of policymakers are active at international conferences, many of whom are not elected, such as professional diplomats (representing the ministries of foreign affairs of the member-states of these international organizations) or civil servants (working for other ministries, agencies, and government bodies). These policymakers do not face electoral retribution if they fail to engage with opposing societal views, nor do they require the amount of political information or support elected politicians need. We therefore expect that the electoral mandate of a policymaker not only affects how she interacts with non-state actors (e.g. Beyers and Kerremans 2004; Lohmann 1998) but also which type of advocacy groups she decides to approach. Namely, we expect that elected politicians are more likely to build a broad support base by trying to persuade advocacy groups with opposing views. Policymakers who face no electoral retribution and fewer political pressures, on the other hand, are more likely to approach allies to stimulate them to voice an outspoken and supportive position. This leads to our third hypothesis: H3 Elected politicians are more prone to persuade advocacy groups of their own position compared to non-elected policymakers.

Research Design The subsequent analyses rely on a novel dataset collected during on-the-­ spot interviews with policymakers active in the fields of trade and climate change. In 2015, the 21st Conference of Parties and 10th Ministerial Conference were organized, and in 2017, the 23rd Conference of Parties and the 11th Ministerial Conference took place. A team of researchers interviewed government attendees regarding their interactions with non-­ state actors at these four conferences. An on-the-spot fieldwork coordinator pointed interviewers to respondents and ensured that all the physical areas of the conference space were covered. All respondents that initially refused to participate in our research, mostly due to time concerns, were invited to fill in the survey afterwards. We are confident that our approach

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enabled us to reduce bias in the type of respondents, with regard to both the type of policymaker (diplomat, civil servant, politician) and the country they were representing (see ‘Annex I’ for a more detailed discussion). For example, government officials representing the small island-­state of Sao Tomé and Principe and those representing the USA are included in our dataset. After all four conferences, we also conducted a web survey2 among participants that we had not managed to speak to. Combining the on-the-spot interviews with the web survey data led to a total response rate of more than 35%; 297 policymakers hailing from 107 countries are included in the analyses for this chapter. The interviews were partly centred on 13 policy issues for the UNFCCC and 17 for the WTO.3 These issues were identified through qualitative interviews (conducted prior to the fieldwork) with policymakers and non-state actors, the provisional agendas of the Conferences of Parties and Ministerial Conferences, draft agreements, position papers, and media reports. An example of an issue discussed at the UNFCCC is whether the global temperature rise should be limited to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, 1.5 degrees, or lower than 1.5 degrees. The first half of the interviews centred around one specific issue that was randomly selected from issues that the respondents had marked as ‘important’ or ‘very important’. The second half of the interviews dealt with climate change and trade policy in general, and the questions in this part were not issue-specific. Next, we present the operationalization of the variables (see Table 6.1 for an overview). For the dependent variable, we relied on the following survey question: ‘In your contacts with non-state stakeholders, you may pursue some goals that might help you during the negotiations. How often do you…? (1) Try to convince non-state stakeholders of your own position and (2) Encourage them to voice an outspoken position’. The answer categories range from 1 (‘never’) to 5 (‘very often’),4 and the first question refers to persuasion, while the second describes amplification. In order to test Hypothesis 1 on salience, we relied on responses to a survey question about the importance of the specific issue compared to other issues on the policy agenda of the country (ranging from 0 = ‘less important’ and 1 = ‘as important’ to 2 = ‘more important’). To assess Hypothesis 2 on the level of democracy, the variable of democratic accountability was based on the Voice and Accountability indicator of the World Bank. This indicator measures perceptions of the extent to which citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media.5 Finally, in order to

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Table 6.1  Overview of variables used Variable

Operationalization

Dependent variables (N = 297) Amplification How often do you contact advocacy groups to encourage them to voice an outspoken position? 1= never (n = 25); 2 = sometimes (n = 108); 3 =regular (n = 87); 4 = often (= 18); 5 =very often (n = 21) Persuasion How often do you contact advocacy groups to convince them of your own position? 1 = never (n = 48); 2 = sometimes (n = 90); 3 = regular (n = 79); 4 = often (= 67); 5 = very often (n = 13) Independent variables Salience Self-reported importance of issues in country: 1 = highly salient (n = 121); 2 = low salience (n = 176) Democracy World Governance Indicator of the World Bank accountability Function of 1 = politician (n = 28); 2 = diplomat (n = 51); 3 = policymaker civil servant (n = 183); 4 = other (n = 35) Control variables Level of 1 = low-income countries (n = 51); 2 = lower-­ development middle-­income countries (n = 56); 3 = higher-­ middle-­income countries (n = 72); 4 = high-income countries (n = 118) Initiate contact Who initiates contact more often? 1 = the policymaker (n = 44); 2 = the advocacy group (n = 120); 3 = evenly (n = 133)

Mean Min

Max

N.A.

1

5

N.A.

1

5

N.A.

1

2

0.26 N.A.

− 1.60 2.07 N.A. N.A.

N.A.

1

N.A.

N.A. N.A.

4

test Hypothesis 3, we relied on a survey question about the function of the respondent. Here, the answer categories were (1) diplomat, (2) civil servant, (3) elected official/politician, and (4) other. Several control variables were added to the analyses. We first controlled for the level of development, based on the World Bank classification system, which makes a distinction between four categories: low-income countries, lower-middle-income countries, higher-middle-income countries, and high-income countries. The categorization is a combined construction of gross national income per capita, the human asset index, and the economic vulnerability index. It could be that in less developed countries, policymakers depend more on the input of advocacy groups. This would mean that, in these countries, activating both advocacy group allies and opponents would be more common. The second control variable

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relates to the interactions policymakers have with non-state actors and is based on the following question: ‘With regard to the contacts you have with non-state stakeholders, is it mostly you who seeks and initiates contact with them or they who initiate contact with you? Or would you say that the contact is initiated rather evenly?’ One could, for instance, imagine that policymakers who do not reach out to advocacy groups are less likely to either use amplification or persuasion, simply because they do not consider advocacy groups to be important players.

Results Descriptive Analysis How common is it for policymakers to approach advocacy groups at international conferences? Figure 6.1 shows that both amplification and persuasion are quite common tactics for policymakers. More than half of the respondents indicated they use one or both of them ‘regularly’, ‘often’, or ‘very often’. Clearly, our presumption that policymakers target advocacy groups is not far-fetched. If we compare both strategies, we see that there is not much difference in how often these are applied. On average, persuasion is slightly more common than amplification (mean persuasion is 2.80; amplification is 2.69). Overall, these results differ from previous studies on advocacy groups, which show that mobilizing allies is much more common than advocating opponents (see for instance Beyers and Hanegraaff 2017). One reason for this difference could be that in our study, we explicitly asked why policymakers interacted with allied or opposing advocacy groups. Did they do so to encourage advocacy groups to voice an outspoken position that is similar to that of the policymaker? Or did they want to 36% 30%

29%

Persuasion 27% 19%

16%

23%

8%

Never

Amplification

7%

Sometimes

Regularly

Often

Fig. 6.1  Frequency using amplification and persuasion

4%

Very often

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Table 6.2  Distribution information exchanges between advocacy groups and policymakers, by content and type Note: In per cent (N = 297) Amplification

Persuasion never Sometimes Regularly Often Very often

Never

Sometimes

Regularly

Often

Very often

4.7 6.4 3 1 1

2.7 15.8 8.1 2.4 1.3

0.7 7.1 11.8 5.4 1.7

0 5.4 6.1 9.1 2

0.3 1.7 0.3 1 1

persuade them? In previous studies on advocacy groups (e.g. Beyers and Hanegraaff 2017; Chalmers 2013b; Gullberg 2008), these motivations for interaction were not questioned. Another possible explanation is that policymakers have more leverage (such as government donations, policy access, and influence) to impact advocacy group behaviour than vice versa and therefore have more plausible prospects when approaching both allied and opposing advocacy groups. One question is how amplification and persuasion are related. In other words, are some policymakers more inclined to reach out to advocacy groups—either allied or opposing ones—or is it rather that some focus almost exclusively on their allies, while others focus mostly on their opponents? Table  6.2 shows that there is indeed a significant correlation between approaching allies and opponents (Spearman’s rho = 0.41; P = 0.00); although the correlation is relatively weak. The results indicate that policymakers who try to persuade opponents show, on average, a higher propensity to also adopt the strategy of amplification. At the same time, there is variation as some policymakers are more focussed on their allies (persuasion) and some on their opponents (amplification). As can be seen in Table 6.2, more than 40% of the policymakers approach allies and opponents equally often, which means that around 60% of the policy delegates focus on either persuasion or amplification. Multivariate Analysis In our multivariate analyses, with amplification and persuasion as dependent variables, we aim to explain the variation presented before. Since policymakers are nested in countries, we run a mixed-effects ordinary least

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squares regression with random intercepts for the countries from which policymakers stem (N = 107 countries).6 Table 6.3 summarizes the results. What do the results tell us? First, concerning the policy context, Table 6.3 and Fig. 6.2 show that on highly salient issues, policymakers more often seek contact with advocacy groups to encourage them to voice their opinion more loudly (amplification) and convince them of their own position (persuasion). The results indicate that the effect of salience is slightly stronger for the amplification strategy (from 2.58 to 2.90) than for Table 6.3  Why do policymakers use amplification or persuasion?

Explanatory variables Salience of issue Democratic accountability Function Politician (ref.) Diplomat Civil servant Other Control variables Level of development High income (ref.) Medium-high income Medium-low income Low income Initiate contact Evenly (ref.) Advocacy group Policymaker Diagnostics Intercept Country-level intercept Level 1 residual Log-likelihood N

Model I amplification coefficient

S.E.

Model II persuasion coefficient

S.E.

0.323** 0.261**

(0.131) 0.265** (0.109) 0.066

(0.126) (0.106)

Ref. − 0.412 − 0.214 0.093

Ref. (0.254) − 0.566** (0.222) − 0.492** (0.271) − 0.242

(0.245) (0.215) (0.262)

Ref. 0.483**

Ref. (0.204) 0.334

(0.201)

0.562** 1.017***

(0.265) 0.293 (0.271) 0.450*

(0.258) (0.265)

Ref. − 0.382** 0.210

Ref. (0.136) − 0.111 (0.191) − 0.274

(0.132) (0.184)

2.408*** 0.000

(0.258) 2.892*** (0.000) 0.016

(0.250) (0.058)

1.124 − 440.263 298

(0.092) 1.036 − 431.835 299

(0.101)

The model is a mixed-effects linear regression which estimates a random intercept for each 107 countries. Coefficients, standard errors (in parentheses), and significance are presented, whereby: *P < 0.1; **P < 0.05; ***P < 0.01

K. LUCAS ET AL.

Low salience

High salience Level of salience of issue

3

3.2

Persuasion

2.4 2.6 2.8

3

3.2

Predicted level of persuasion

Amplification

2.4 2.6 2.8

Predicted level of amplification

180 

Low salience

High salience

Level of salience of issue

Fig. 6.2  Predicted probability plots for amplification (left) and persuasion (right), by levels of salience. Note: See Table  6.3, based on Model 1 (left) and Model 2 (right)

persuasion (from 2.70 to 2.96). On salient issues, policymakers are in higher demand for political support and expertise to help them secure the preferred policy outcome. When policymakers are able to show that their policy outcome is broadly supported, they have a higher chance of moving the decision-making process in their preferred direction. However, especially on highly salient issues, which tend to attract many different advocacy organizations, policymakers need to selectively prioritize their targets. On these issues, securing support and information subsidies from allies is less risky than trying to persuade opponents. Hence, policymakers reach out to opponents somewhat less often than to their allies. Overall, Hypothesis 1 is thus confirmed. Second, we focus on the institutional context. Here, we see that, as expected, policymakers hailing from democracies tend to rely relatively more on the amplification strategy, asking advocacy allies to voice their common position more vigorously. In contrast, we see no statistical difference between the level of democratic accountability and the extent to which policymakers attempt to persuade advocacy groups to take a different position (see also Fig. 6.3 for a visual depiction of the results). This only partially confirms Hypothesis 2. The difference could be explained by the fact that advocacy group communities in democratic states are typically large and the struggle for their support is more competitive (Lohmann 1998). It could be said, then, that policymakers in democratic countries reach out to allies more often than to opponents in comparison with policymakers in nondemocratic states because the former is a less risky strategy than the latter. In order to extensively analyse the role of the institutional

181

-1.5

-1

-.5

0

.5

1.5

2

3

3.5 1

Democratic accountability

2.5

Predicted level of persuasion

3 2.5 -2

Persuasion

2

3.5

Amplification

2 1.5

Predicted level of amplification

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-2

-1.5

-1

-.5

0

.5

1

1.5

2

Democratic accountability

Fig. 6.3  Predicted probability plots for amplification (left) and persuasion (right), by levels of democratic accountability. Notes: See Table  6.3, based on model 1 (left) and model 2 (right)

context on persuasion, more detailed country-level variation seems necessary. For example, the type of political system—such as majoritarian versus consensus democracies—could be used in future research to flesh out why (or why not) opponents are more frequently approached by policymakers across countries. Third, with regard to the political mandate of the policymaker, we see that elected politicians are significantly more prone to trying to persuade advocacy groups than other types of policymakers are (see Fig. 6.4 for a visual depiction of the results). Hypothesis 3 is thus confirmed. Elected politicians are more inclined to build a broad and encompassing support base by trying to persuade interest organizations with opposing views compared to non-elected civil servants and diplomats. Moreover, elected politicians seem much more sensitive to the political environment as part of their political mandate. Since these politicians are subject to electoral retribution and are more sensitive to legitimacy loss, they are more likely to approach advocacy groups with opposing views to attempt to persuade them of their own opinion, hoping that these groups will in turn halt or tone down their criticism in public debates. Policymakers who are not concerned about re-election, on the other hand, are not significantly more likely to use the strategy of amplification. Political opposition is apparently less consequential to them as it will usually not immediately lead to a loss in power or legitimacy.

K. LUCAS ET AL.

Diplomat

Civil servant

Elected official/politician

Other

3

3.5

Persuasion

2.5

Predicted level of persuasion

2.5

3

3.5

Amplification

2

Predicted level of amplification

182 

Diplomat

Civil servant

Elected official/politician

Other

Function of policymaker

Function of policymaker

Fig. 6.4  Predicted probability plots for amplification (left) and persuasion (right), by types of policymakers. Notes: See Table 6.3, based on model 1 (left) and model 2 (right)

Conclusion This chapter started from the premise that policymakers are dependent on advocacy groups for political support and expertise. Policymakers were presumed to actively seek out and ‘lobby the lobbyists’ to secure political support and gather relevant expertise. We identified two strategies: (1) amplification, which involves approaching allied advocacy groups, and (2) persuasion, which includes exchanges with advocacy group opponents. In line with the objective of the edited volume, we attempted to explain variation in both tactics by examining the information needs of policymakers and advocacy groups, and how this is mediated by the institutional and policy context (see Chap. 1). The results demonstrate that, overall, policymakers seek out advocacy groups more when they are faced with increased levels of political pressures. While recent studies have conceptualized the relationship between advocacy groups and policymakers in global policymaking as an exchange of expertise (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017), our findings point at the importance of advocacy group opposition and support in these interactions. Namely, elected politicians are more prone to seek out opposing societal interests to try to persuade them to adjust or tone down their position. Moreover, in line with the broader expectation of this edited volume, we found that the exchanges between advocacy groups and policymakers are critically mediated by the institutional and policy context in which policymakers operate. Salience affects both the mobilization of allies and opponents by policymakers, and policymakers from democratically accountable countries are more inclined to use amplification.

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Our study integrates a new perspective into the literature on advocacy groups as we studied the perceptions of policymakers rather than the perspective of advocacy groups in lobby exchanges. Interestingly, we identified a genuine interest among policymakers in their advocacy opponents; policymakers at international conferences are slightly more likely to try and persuade their opponents rather than mobilize their allies. This finding sheds new light on the interest group literature, which has systematically found that advocacy groups prefer to engage in cooperative exchanges with likeminded policymakers rather than persuade opposing policymakers (e.g. Beyers and Hanegraaff 2017; Chalmers 2011; Crombez 2002; Gullberg 2008; Hall 2006). Our study shows that this does not necessarily hold true for advocacy interactions initiated by policymakers, and this area clearly warrants additional research, for instance, by combining the preferences of both state officials and advocacy groups in one research design. Another key contribution is that we empirically show that policymakers, by choosing either amplification or persuasion tactics, affect the behaviour and opportunities of advocacy groups. At the same time, policymakers are at the receiving end of these exchanges. This is an important addition to the (I)NGO and interest groups literature as it highlights the fluidity of political opportunity structures and shows how policymaking is set by non-state and state actors together (see Green and Auld 2017; Prakash and Potoski 2014). We believe this provides multiple avenues for future research, for instance, on how often policymakers successfully change the position of advocacy groups. There is thus much room for future research to further substantiate our theoretical ideas and research findings. First, while our study is the result of a large-scale collaborative research project and draws from an extensive and novel database, it is confined to policymakers present at international conferences. Our findings can therefore not be readily generalized to policymakers that did not participate in these conferences (e.g. the majority of local politicians and national parliamentarians). However, since international conferences can be considered as a ‘least likely case’ for policymakers to value and seek political support, we expect our findings to travel well to other policy contexts and political arenas. Most prominently, our findings related to the national context probably do not only apply to policymakers and advocacy organizations from these countries that work in a global context. On the contrary, it seems reasonable that the country differences we observed are applicable to advocacy groups and policymakers working exclusively at the national level as well. However, the importance

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of salience might be an exception, though. As transnational issues tend to be less salient than domestic issues, policymakers reach out to advocacy groups even more at the national level than at the international level. Yet, this should not necessarily affect the way in which they approach advocacy groups, as salience seems to enhance both amplification and persuasion according to our findings. At this point, we can only speculate about potential similarities and differences, due to the type of data we have collected. Future studies could build on our theoretical rationale and assess the external validity of our findings beyond the case of transnational policymaking. Second, as indicated, this study has only scratched the surface of what we believe is a crucial dimension of state-advocacy group relations. We therefore hope future studies will more explicitly consider the active role of policymakers in their exchanges with advocacy groups. One possibility is to use a more qualitative approach that allows for unravelling the mechanisms underlying amplification and persuasion strategies. Our explorative in-depth interviews indicate that, especially in developed countries, ministries organize meetings with advocacy groups in preparation of the global conferences. As the Dutch chief negotiator at the UN climate conferences explained: ‘we were very active in approaching actors (…) not only companies, but also provinces and cities. We saw an ambition there and we did not see that [ambition] being reflected in these [climate] negotiations. (…) So we went to these actors to talk [and ask]: “Do you have ideas to improve it?”’7 This also touches a point that requires further study, namely the role that is attributed to advocacy groups within the political system. A possible explanation why amplification is used more often in democratically accountable countries might be that in these countries, advocacy groups are seen as serious actors, while in other, less democratically accountable countries, this might be different. As one civil servant explained: ‘We don’t talk to them, because first of all they don’t come to us and if they do come to us they do not want to talk about the reality, their position is very ideological. There is little space for dialogue. (…) At the political level, the politicians know that the NGOs will do them no harm, so they try to make policies based on the current situation.’8 Such anecdotes highlight the need for more research to explore the ways in which policymakers reach out to lobbyists as well as the impact this has on the work of lobbyists and, eventually, the policy process. Third, this chapter provided three general hypotheses to explain the use of amplification or persuasion strategies by policymakers. However, many

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other explanatory factors, or more complex relations, could exist. For instance, are there differences among policymaker’s ideological positions (e.g. left–right), or politicians in a position of power or not? These questions fall beyond the scope of this chapter. More research into this area is thus very welcome in order to expand our understanding of the interactions between policymakers and non-state actors and the role and influence of advocacy groups in global governance.

Notes 1. Interview conducted at the Conference of Parties in Paris, 4 December 2015. 2. The questions in this survey were also identical to the questions in the interviews. Only small linguistic changes were made. For example, during the interviews, we asked policymakers: ‘At this Conference of Parties (COP)…’. In the survey, this was changed to ‘At COP21…’. 3. See ‘Annex II’ for more information on the issues. 4. When respondents were unsure which category to pick, researchers explained that ‘regularly’ refers to multiple times a year, ‘often’ to once every month, and ‘very often’ to more than once a month. 5. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/worldwide-­g overnance-­ indicators (accessed 21 August 2018). 6. As robustness checks (see ‘Annex III’), we first ran ordered logistic regression to see whether this changed the results, and it did not. Second, we performed seemingly unrelated regression analyses to check whether the error terms in the regression equations for amplification and persuasion are correlated. This did not change the results either. 7. Interview conducted at the UNFCCC preparatory meeting in Bonn, June 2015. 8. Interview conducted at the UNFCCC preparatory meeting in Bonn, June 2015. Acknowledgements  Iskander De Bruycker gratefully acknowledges the support of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) (Post doc Grant No. 12N1417N).

Annex I—Methodology With a team of researchers, we randomly conducted interviews with policymakers at the COPs and MCs. The respondents were chosen by the researcher in charge (‘pointer’) to make sure interviewers would not (unknowingly) have a bias in their selection of respondents (e.g. convenience sampling). Moreover, the researcher in charge made sure all

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physical areas at the conference location were targeted in order to increase the chance of getting a random and representative sample of the participants at the conferences. The fact that our sample includes policymakers from over 100 hundred countries, including both key players (Russia, China, the United States) and policymakers from smaller countries (Samoa, the Netherlands), makes us confident the sample is a good representation of the broader population. In total, we conducted 181 interviews at the climate conferences and 93 interviews at the trade conferences. The response rate is almost 50%, based on our notes of the interviews each of our team members conducted and the rejections we received. There is no reason to believe that policymakers who refused to be interviewed are fundamentally different from the ones who participated. In addition, we noticed that most refusals were not because policymakers did not want to participate in our research but because they had limited time during the negotiations. Therefore, we have no indications that the sample has affected the results. Moreover, one needs to bear in mind that the rejections could be from all types of actors present at the international conferences: policymakers, representatives of international organizations, and representatives of advocacy groups. We were unable to specify response rates per group of actors, since we simply approached people on the conference sites and often did not know what type of actor we invited for an interview. Also, sometimes advocates were invited (unintentionally) two or three times by different interviewers or they refused the first invitation but then agreed when invited again. However, because we monitored which countries and types of policymakers we had already covered during the fieldwork, we were able to improve the representativeness of our sample considerably. For example, during the climate conference in Paris, one of our researchers spent considerable time getting Chinese and Russian policymakers to participate. The interviews were combined with data that we collected through a web survey immediately after the conferences. Between January and April 2016, we sent out surveys to all country delegations that our team did not manage to interview while we were in Paris and Nairobi. To policymakers active at the climate conference in Bonn, surveys were sent out between December 2017 and January 2018. This means that respondents who were too busy during the negotiations were given another opportunity to participate in our research. The respondents were selected on the basis of the provisional list of participants for the UNFCCC; this list includes the non-state actors, international organizations, and states that received

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accreditation and their representatives. In addition, we sent the questionnaire to all policymakers from whom we received a business card during our time in Paris and Bonn, but whom we did not manage to interview. Due to tensions between China and Chinese Taipei, the WTO secretariat is not allowed to distribute a list of participating countries. Instead, we provided the secretariat with a list of countries that were still missing in the database and received the contact details of the focal points of these delegations. In doing this, we made sure that there was an equal distribution among the different continents and the size of countries. (We selected both small and bigger countries.) Moreover, we selected countries that represent the different coalitions within the WTO, such as the ACP Group or the Cotton-4. We also sent the survey to government representatives of whom we had received a business card during the conferences in Nairobi and Buenos Aires. The questionnaires were sent out quickly after the conferences took place. In this way, we tried to reduce memory loss among the respondents; what happened during the conference was still fresh in their mind. Of all the invitations for the survey that we sent (N = 1590), 310 respondents (partially) completed the survey, that is a response rate of 19.5%. This rate was achieved by sending out two electronic reminders, after two weeks and four weeks. One has to bear in mind that the respondents come from all over the world and many governments active at these conferences lack a website that is up to date, which meant that we could not send our invitations to the right persons. Moreover, some of the invitations could not be delivered or were bounced, for example, because of defunct email addresses.

Annex II—Issues The interviews and surveys used for this chapter were partly policy-­ centred. The policy issues were selected by combining qualitative interviews with the provisional agreements, the provisional agendas, news articles, and position papers of interest organizations. In total, 13 policy issues for the UNFCCC and 17 for the WTO were identified. Some issues were on the negotiating table in both 2015 and 2017, while others were only relevant during one of the two interview rounds. In Tables 6.4 and 6.5, we present the issues that were discussed at these four conferences.

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Table 6.4  Issues discussed at the UNFCCC COPs Issue

Year

Climate finance: who should contribute? Degrees-goal NDCs: Annex or COP decision? MRV: strength of compliance (developing) MRV: strength of compliance (developed) NDCs: commitment period and assessment Loss and damage: finance mechanism Loss and damage: funding NDCs: guidance Adaptation fund Transparency framework Gender action plan Adaptation communication

2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 2015 and 2017 2015 and 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017

Table 6.5  Issues discussed at the WTO MCs Issue

Year

GATS negotiations TiSA negotiations Export subsidies in agriculture Export subsidies in agriculture: marketing and internal transportation subsidies Agriculture: pillars Cotton Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) Special Safeguard Mechanism on Agriculture

2015 2015 2015 2015

Future of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) Public stockholding in agriculture Public stockholding: conditions Fisheries E-commerce E-commerce: who should negotiate Investment facilitation Investment facilitation: who should negotiate Trade facilitation agreement on services

2015 2015 2015 2015 and 2017 2015 and 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017

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On each of these issues, several policy positions and the status quo were identified. For example, on the future of the Doha Development Agenda, we asked respondents whether they were advocating (1) full implementation of the original DDA mandate, or whether they were in favour of (2) continuing working on DDA while exploring different negotiating approaches, or whether they wanted to (3) end DDA and draft a new work programme. On this issue, the status quo is full implementation of the mandate, since this was reaffirmed in the Nairobi Ministerial Declaration.

Annex III—Robustness Checks Robustness check I.  Ordered logistic regression models with random intercept for all 107 countries included Model I Amplification

Explanatory variables Salience of issue Democratic accountability Function Politician (ref.) Diplomat Civil servant Other Control variables Level of development High income (ref.) Medium-high income Medium-low income Low income

Model II Persuasion

Coefficient

S.E.

Coefficient

S.E.

0.571** 0.463**

(0.223) (0.189)

0.477** 0.155

(0.229) (0.198)

Ref. − 0.773* − 0.406 0.110

(0.436) (0.375) (0.462)

Ref. − 1.046** − 0.949** − 0.511

(0.442) (0.396) (0.476)

Ref. 0.872** 1.023** 1.812***

(0.354) (0.452) (0.482)

Ref. 0.572 0.494 0.786

(0.109) (0.308) (0.116)

Initiate contact (continued)

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(continued) Model I Amplification

Evenly (ref.) Advocacy group Policymaker Diagnostics Intercept 1 Intercept 2 Intercept 3 Intercept 4 Country-level intercept Log-likelihood Wald Chi2 (10) Prob > Chi2 N

Model II Persuasion

Coefficient

S.E.

Coefficient

S.E.

Ref. − 0.641*** 0.353

(0.236) (0.324)

Ref. − 0.241 0.483

(0.237) (0.341)

− 1.289*** 0.318 1.545*** 3.684*** 0.000

(0.454) (0.446) (0.454) (0.521) (0.000)

− 2.749*** − 0.487 0.858** 2.480*** 0.049

(0.504) (0.455) (0.453) (0.487) (0.182)

− 425.445 34 0.000 298

− 419.198 20 0.029 299

Coefficients, standard errors (in parentheses), and significance are presented, whereby: *P < 0.1; **P < 0.05; ***P < 0.01

Robustness check II. Seemingly unrelated regression analysis Amplification

Explanatory variables Salience of issue Democratic accountability Function Politician (ref.) Diplomat Civil servant Other Control variables Level of development High income (ref.) Medium-high income Medium-low income Low income

Persuasion

Coefficient

S.E.

Coefficient

S.E.

0.317** 0.263**

(0.131) (0.109)

0.262** 0.078

(0.127) (0.105)

Ref. − 0.418* − 0.224 0.089

(0.254) (0.222) (0.271)

Ref. − 0.581** − 0.476** − 0.220

(0.245) (0.215) (0.262)

Ref. 0.489*** 0.571** 0.995**

(0.204) (0.263) (0.271)

Ref. 0.322 0.311 0.504*

(0.197) (0.254) (0.262) (continued)

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(continued) Amplification

Initiate contact Evenly (ref.) Advocacy group Policymaker Diagnostics Intercept R-sq

Persuasion

Coefficient

S.E.

Coefficient

S.E.

Ref. − 0.382*** 0.174

(0.137) (0.193)

Ref. − 0.124 0.310

(0.132) (0.186)*

2.419*** 0.105

(0.258)

Amplification Coefficient Chi2 Prob > Chi2 N

− 2.871*** 0.074

(0.249)

Persuasion S.E.

34.94 0.000 297

Coefficient

S.E.

23.76 0.008 297

Coefficients, standard errors (in parentheses), and significance are presented, whereby: *P < 0.1; **P < 0.05; ***P < 0.01

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CHAPTER 7

The Stakes of Global Venue Shopping: Examining Bank Lobbying in the Basel Committee and the European Union Adam William Chalmers and Adela Alexandra Iacobov

Introduction Increasingly, advocacy groups1 are confronted with policy issues for which important decision-making competencies are situated at multiple levels of government. A large and growing research agenda has emerged to examine these trends, especially with the aim of explaining when and why advocacy groups decide to engage in so-called multilevel venue shopping. 1  We define advocacy groups as ‘non-profit or profit interest organisations that may pursue domestic or global strategies, or adopt a mix of domestic and global strategies to achieve their goals’ (Chap. 1). Also see Baroni et al. (2014) for a discussion of the ‘interest group’ concept.

A. W. Chalmers (*) School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. A. Iacobov GlobalFocus Centre, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. M. Dellmuth, E. A. Bloodgood (eds.), Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8_7

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Importantly, to date, this literature has almost exclusively focused on venue shopping between state and federal levels of government (for an overview, see Holyoke et al. 2012) or between national governments and global decision-making institutions (Bernhagen and Mitchell 2009; Dür and Mateo 2016; Ehrlich and Jones 2016; Eising et al. 2017; Marshall and Bernhagen 2017).2 The aim of this chapter is to examine global venue shopping: venue shopping between different global decision-making bodies tasked with setting out far-reaching (global and regional) rules and standards. Understanding global venue shopping is important, not least because of an increasing shift in policymaking powers to global institutions, whether with regard to regional integration projects like the European Union, the African Union, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, or global governance institutions that provide global standards and regulations on everything from finance (e.g. the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) to the environment (United Nations Environment Programme) to the internet (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The existing literature on venue shopping fails to provide a bespoke framework from which to evaluate the factors that influence advocacy groups’ choices between multiple global venues. Our starting point is the idea that global venue shopping can be explained by a firm’s stake in the newly proposed regulation. We advance on existing research, which examines these stakes in terms of regulatory exposure (the extent to which firms are targeted by new rules) and the domestic regulatory environment (the existing stock of domestic regulation), by arguing that stakes are related to firms’ international business activities. The current system of overlapping global regulatory jurisdictions and multiple global decision-making bodies means that a firm’s stake in regulatory change is a matter of having more investments in more regulatory jurisdictions and across a greater number of national borders. In short, firms that stand to win or lose the most from regulatory change by virtue of the international scope of their business activities will also be more likely to seek to influence and shape regulation in all relevant global venues. The empirical focus of this analysis is on the negotiation of post-crisis banking regulation in two global governance institutions: the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and the European Union (EU). Both venues were critical in radically re-regulating finance in the 2  One important exception is Beyers and Kerremans (2012) who examine venue shopping across national, EU, and WTO levels.

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post-crisis period. Banks, whether inside or outside the EU, were highly motivated to lobby in both venues. First, the EU has a long-standing practice of effectively ‘downloading’ Basel rules into EU law (Quaglia 2014, 43ff). EU-based banks seeking to shape any new banking rules would therefore reasonably start in the BCBS and see their preferences reflected in the new Basel III rules. Equally, non-EU banks, while nominally governed by Basel rules, also have a stake in EU banking regulations. The EU’s system of ‘passporting’, which allows non-EU banks with a subsidiary in one EU member state to freely offer financial services in all EU member states, requires that these same banks strictly abide by EU regulations. In short, there is a tight link between Basel and EU banking regulations, producing optimal conditions and incentives for banks to engage in global venue shopping. Within this specific context, we examine how a bank’s decision to engage in global venue shopping can be explained by the extent to which banks are motivated by the expected impact of new global and EU banking rules on their own international financial activities. This, we argue, is directly reflected in the size, scope, and diversity of banks’ domestic and international subsidiaries. Having a large and geographically diverse number of subsidiaries sees banks operating under overlapping and sometimes competing regulatory jurisdictions, thereby incentivising them to engage in lobbying in multiple regulatory and decision-making venues. To test these arguments, we have generated a novel data set based on public stakeholder consultations on BCBS and EU regulatory proposals. Our data comprise 37 consultations and 218 banks lobbying the BCBS and the European Commission from 2010 to 2016. We also engaged in extensive coding of bank characteristics as well as a host of factors related to various ‘opportunity structures’, like the domestic regulatory context and issue characteristics. Controlling for a battery of alternative explanations, our statistical analysis provides support for our main argument. In particular, we find that banks with subsidiaries in a greater and more diverse number of different countries are more likely to engage in global venue shopping.

Determinants of Venue Shopping Venue shopping can be understood as advocacy groups mobilising on a single policy issue or a related set of policy issues across two or more decision-making venues in order to maximise their chances of lobbying success,

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or at least to minimise a lobbying loss.3 Empirically, this amounts to scholars studying venue shopping in terms of three main factors: (1) group characteristics, (2) venue characteristics, and (3) issue characteristics. It is commonplace among advocacy group scholars to explain a multitude of different advocacy activities and behaviours in terms of groups’ organisational characteristics. Whether it is explaining advocacy success, mobilisation patterns, or the choice of advocacy strategies, resource-rich groups with more financial and personnel resources are simply more capable of doing more than their resource-poor counterparts. The same logic has been applied to the question of venue shopping. Resource-rich firms ‘will be more likely to lobby’ (Bernhagen and Mitchell 2009, 159), ‘have more resources to commit to lobbying’ (Ehrlich and Jones 2016, 477), and are ‘more likely to expand their action repertoire and develop multilevel venue shopping’ (Beyers and Kerremans 2012, 266). The underlying idea is that lobbying is costly, and lobbying in multiple venues only increases these costs. Often, group type is used as a proxy for resources. In this case, scholars predict that business advocacy groups, typically with superior resources, will engage in more venue shopping than NGOs and citizen groups that, by virtue of the nature of the interests they represent, will be limited in their capacity to engage in advocacy activities, let alone in multiple decision-making venues (Beyers and Kerremans 2012, 264; Dür and Mateo 2016; Eising et al. 2017, 958). Venue shopping is not only a matter of resources or group type. Indeed, it also relates to various opportunity structures that groups face. The first opportunity structure, venue characteristics, determines when groups will engage in venue shopping. There are three main venue characteristics to consider. The first can be categorised in terms of embeddedness, or how domestic political institutions incentivise groups to mobilise in particular venues. Several studies highlight how groups in national corporatist systems are less likely to lobby an international decision-making venue because of their reliance on peak associations to do so for them. Groups from pluralist systems, by contrast, are less reliant on industry-level associations, have developed greater lobbying capabilities, and are thus also better able to lobby beyond national borders (Ehrlich and Jones 2016, 469).

Venue shopping can therefore be characterised as the engagement of advocacy groups in multilevel lobbying games (Marshall and Bernhagen 2017, 984). 3 

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Embeddedness has been explained more broadly in terms of ‘access points’ (Ehrlich and Jones 2016) or ‘ties within an extensive network of domestic policymakers’ (Beyers and Kerremans 2012, 264). In both cases, groups that are already more deeply involved in national decision-making processes, whether that is via formal systems of intermediation or more informal systems of consultation, are less likely to lobby in other venues. Scholars have also examined venue characteristics in terms of venue favourability and venue relevance. The two go hand in hand. First, venue favourability reflects the extent to which groups lobby venues where decision-­makers already share their policy preferences and are supportive of specific advocacy goals (Constantelos 2010, 474). Ultimately, lobbying in favourable and hospitable venues increases the chances of lobbying success. An important recent study finds that venue favourability, assessed in terms of the perceived quality of relations (i.e. the presence or absence of conflict) between advocacy groups and decision-makers, facilitates venue shopping (Marshall and Bernhagen 2017, 990). Another recent study examines favourability in terms of the positional and ideological alignments between groups and decision-makers (Eising et al. 2017). Second, venue relevance also refers to the legislative competencies of specific decision-­making venues. Given that decision-making competencies can be situated in different venues at different levels of government, advocacy groups tend to seek out venues where decision-makers are actively working on the issue (Holyoke et al. 2012, 13), where the appropriate competencies have been located or transferred (Dür and Mateo 2016), and where the venue is deemed by advocacy groups to be important in the larger decision-making process (Constantelos 2010, 472). A second opportunity structure identified by scholars as a determinant of venue shopping is issue characteristics. For instance, Beyers and Kerremans (2012, 269) explain how groups are more likely to engage in venue shopping when the issue they are lobbying on is ‘threatening, salient, and costly to them’. It is useful to isolate these three points. First, issue salience refers to the importance of the issue for advocacy groups, to the general public, as well as to states. In the first instance, groups are more likely to venue shop when the issue is important to them. In the second instance, greater levels of public salience tend to shine a light on lobbying practices and make all kinds of lobbying more difficult (Culpepper 2011). Lastly, increased issue salience can incentivise venue shopping for many advocacy groups, especially those considered to operate as ‘service bureaus’ to state actors (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Hall and Deardorff 2006).

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Threatening and costly issues are those with a considerable negative impact on the status quo. Bernhagen and Mitchell (2009) and later Ehrlich and Jones (2016) reframe this point in terms of ‘regulatory exposure’: firms in industries facing stronger regulatory impact as a consequence of a proposed regulatory change have a greater incentive to venue shop.

Determinants of Global Venue Shopping A central aim of this analysis is to advance a theoretical framework for understanding global venue shopping. Existing theories, while providing rich insights and compelling arguments, are (for the most part) implicitly tailored to venue shopping that takes place between the national and international levels. This is most evident in a type of home-state bias built into most venue shopping theories. An advocacy group’s natural location is its country of origin, and international venues are foreign, supplementary, and separate. In this narrative, an advocacy group’s capacity to venue shop is moderated primarily by domestic political institutions. Moving beyond the orbit of the home state often requires considerable resources (Bernhagen and Mitchell 2009, 159; Beyers and Kerremans 2012, 266; Ehrlich and Jones 2016, 478), painful adjustments to existing lobbying repertories (Dür and Mateo 2016, 214), and an (unrealistically) inviting global venue (Constantelos 2010; Marshall and Bernhagen 2017). Even the so-called compensation theory of venue shopping makes these same basic assumptions: resource-poor advocacy groups shift their lobbying focus to an international venue only when domestic conditions have cast them out of policymaking processes and barred them from domestic points of access and consultation (Beyers and Kerremans 2012). The problem with assuming a home-state bias for venue shopping is that it does not reflect the realities of rulemaking and standard setting in an era of advanced globalisation, interdependence, and polycentrism. What is more, assuming a home-state bias occludes the multinational character of many of the world’s most powerful firms seeking to influence these rules. International relations scholars have made this point forcefully. First, scholars describe globalisation as ‘a process of rule overlap between jurisdictions’ (Farrell and Newman 2014, 498), upsetting status quo regulatory bargains insofar as firms (as well as advocacy groups, regulators, and even citizens) find themselves affected by rules from other multiple and sometimes overlapping and competing jurisdictions. In short, the home-­state bias has been

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eroded as traditional state-level decision-making and regulatory competences have shifted to regional and international bodies. For transnational and multinational firms, as well as INGOs, unique incentives have been created to influence political and regulatory change at the global level. Cerny (2010, 5) has called this a type of ‘transnational neo-pluralism’, highlighting the formation of powerful ‘transnational linkages amongst groups’ and the activity of ‘cross-border advocacy groups’ brought together by economic interdependence. ‘The most important “movers and shakers” in regulatory politics are no longer domestic forces, but rather ‘actors that can coordinate their activities across borders’ (ibid., 6). Indeed, for INGOs, advocacy has taken on a unique international dimension with groups using a boomerang pattern to reach out to like-­ minded NGOs and international regulatory and decision-making venues in an effort to affect domestic politics (Keck and Sikkink 1998). More recent research has extended this line of inquiry to private sector actors, applying the boomerang pattern of advocacy to the efforts of labour unions to impact domestic working conditions in specific firms (den Hond and Bakker 2012). Bringing together insights from the interest group literature as well as international relations scholarship, we argue that understanding global venue shopping can be explained by a firm’s specific stakes in any proposed regulatory change. While existing studies link ‘stakes’ to things like regulatory exposure (whether or not a firm or industry is targeted by proposed new rules) or the domestic regulatory environment (the existing set of domestic regulations), we argue that a firm’s stakes in venue shopping are better examined through a firm’s international business activity. A system of overlapping global jurisdictions and multiple global decision-making bodies implies an impact on a firm’s business activities that goes well beyond the domestic context. Indeed, under these conditions, a firm’s stake in regulatory change is directly related to the international scope of their business activities—having more investments in more regulatory jurisdictions and countries (on this point, see Chalmers 2017; Goldbach 2015). Our theory is consistent with the widely held idea that venue shopping is linked to the (potential) costs incurred via regulatory change. Indeed, we share Bernhagen and Mitchell’s (2009) focus on costs as they relate to the material implications regulatory changes have for firms’ revenues. In our case, the costs dramatically increase as firms’ business activities increase in international scope and intensity. Taking these insights together, we can state our central hypothesis.

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The greater the scope of a firm’s international business activities, the more likely it is to engage in global venue shopping.

Methodology In this section, we first discuss some specifics related to our case of banking regulation and our two global venues, and second, we provide details about data collection and variable operationalisation. Banking Regulation in the BCBS and the EU Our starting point is the observation that policy context matters. Each lobbying battle is over a set of specific issues that, in turn, impact lobbying behaviour, lobbying success, patterns of advocacy group alignment, and lobbying strategies like venue shopping (Klüver et al. 2015, 448). Where other studies of venue shopping often ignore policy context or examine and compare more than one policy, in this analysis we opt to hold the policy context constant. To this end, we have elected to narrow the empirical focus of this analysis to global venue shopping on post-crisis banking reforms as they were negotiated in the BCBS and the EU.  In terms of generalising beyond our case, banking regulation constitutes a most-likely case for our argument insofar as the banking sector has a long and well-­ established history of global rulemaking (the BCBS was established in 1974, and the EU has been regulating banks since 1971 with the ‘First Banking Directive’). Furthermore, processes of financialisation and globalisation have seen an intense increase in banks’ cross-board activities, trends in foreign entry, and the rise of so-called systemically important banks (Davis and Green 2008, 34).4 In short, many banks are accustomed to operating in multiple countries and within multiple jurisdictions. The specifics of our case are not only ideal for testing our hypothesis but also reveal in their details the exigencies EU and non-EU banks faced in lobbying both global venues. First, the BCBS, often ‘characterized as

For good overviews of the Basel Committee and the various Basel Accords, see Goodhart (2011) and Tarullo (2008). 4 

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perhaps the most prominent example of international regulatory harmonization to date’ (Chalmers 2017, 110; Singer 2007), responded to systemic weaknesses in global banking regulation revealed during the 2007 crisis with the introduction of Basel III, a new set of more stringent prudential and statutory rules for international banks. Despite lacking a formal legal personality, the BCBS’s regulations have ‘surprising power and reach in global financial governance’ (ibid.), being used by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to evaluate financial soundness in emerging and developing markets (Barth et al. 2006). BCBS rules are even adopted by a large number of countries lacking formal representation on the committee, as non-member governments faced strong incentives to emulate the standards generated in order to smoothen their activities in global markets. The EU, following a precedent set with early BCBS banking rules (Basel I and Basel II), adopted but also adapted Basel III rules for the EU context, resulting in the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR), establishing prudential requirements for credit institutions, and the Capital Requirements Directive (CRDIV), governing deposit taking activities. In the process of ‘downloading’ Basel III (Quaglia 2014, 46), the EU was tasked with adapting a set of global standards that were meant to regulate internationally active banks for a set of EU rules that would not only form the backbone of the new ‘single rulebook’ on banking but would also apply to all banks active in the EU, big and small. Via the EU’s system of financial services passporting, which allows financial services firms based and regulated in one European Economic Area country to do business in other member states purely on the basis of their EU home-state authorisation, these same rules apply to a host of non-EU banks that have subsidiaries in Europe. In short, the stakes were high for EU banks as well as their nonEU counterparts. Dependent Variable: Global Venue Shopping We assess global venue shopping using a novel data set based on public stakeholder consultations in two venues, the BCBS and EU, on two related policies (Basel III and CRR-CRDIV) over a seven-year period (2009–2016).5 Our data set consists of 37 consultations and 218 banks (a This time period corresponds to the first and last consultations for either CRR-CRDIV or Basel III. 5 

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full list of banks is presented in ‘Appendix’). Our argument is specific to firm-level lobbying, and, in an effort to control for industry-level differences, this analysis will focus on the global venue shopping patterns of banks. As such, associations (including associations of which banks may be members) are excluded from this analysis. While associations are important lobbying actors (Chalmers 2019), our focus on international investment is specific to banks. We identified banks by coding all actors in our data set using the International Standard Industrial Classification scheme (ISIC rev. 4), a United Nations system for classifying diverse economic sector activities. Banks are identified by the ISIC scheme as the category of actors engaging in ‘all financial service activities’ (i.e. monetary intermediation, the activities of holding companies, trusts, funds, financial leasing, and credit granting). Inter-coder reliability tests of the coding were conducted, and the result was a Krippendorff’s alpha coefficient of 0.81, well within an acceptable range for reliability. Venue shopping is a categorical variable taking three values: 1 = only the EU was lobbied (n = 40); 2 = only the BCBS was lobbied (n = 134); and 3 = both EU and BCBS were lobbied (n = 44). Explanatory Variable: International Scope Our central argument is that banks’ decisions to engage in global venue shopping are a function of the scope of banks’ international financial activities. We operationalise this variable in several ways using data from the Orbis Database (Orbis4. bvdinfo.com, 2017).6 Our main focus is on banks’ subsidiaries, their geographical provenance, and their distribution across different countries. A focus on banks’ international subsidiaries as a proxy for international financial activities is consistent with widely used definitions of foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly with regard to mergers and acquisitions (Cohn 2016, 415).7 Indeed, firms become ‘multinational’ by virtue of their FDI. We measure International scope in three ways: (1) how many subsidiaries does a bank have (Number of subsidiaries); (2) in how many different countries are these subsidiaries located (Reach of subsidiaries); (3) how diversely distributed are these subsidiaries

Available at: https://orbis4.bvdinfo.com. Accessed 2/4/2018. Definitions of FDI also commonly refer to greenfield investment: the creation of new facilities or assets in foreign countries. However, this is not applicable to banks’ international activities (see Cohn 2016, 415). 6  7 

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across different countries (Diversity of subsidiaries). While Number of subsidiaries is a very blunt measure of the international financial activities of a bank, Reach of subsidiaries taps the extent to which banks are potentially operating in multiple, overlapping, and often competing regulatory jurisdictions. Our third indicator, Diversity of subsidiaries, raises the bar for measuring banks’ international financial activities even higher. Diversity of subsidiaries uses a Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) to measure the diversity of banks’ subsidiaries based on their geographical provenance. An HHI is based on the sum of the squared proportions of subsidiaries belonging to any given country per individual bank. Diversity ranges from a theoretical value of 0, where banks would have an extremely concentrated group of subsidiaries situated in just a few or even, in some cases, only one country, to 1, where banks would have an extremely diverse group of subsidiaries situated in a very large number of different countries.8 Box and whisker plots for these three measures of international scope as well as an analysis of variance are presented in ‘Appendix’. Importantly, banks are often part of an intricate and extensive ownership network involving the individual bank, its subsidiaries, as well as, in many cases, a global ultimate owner (GUO). While several banks in our database are the GUO, many of them are themselves subsidiaries of a GUO (just a bit more than half of the sample). The international scope of a bank that is itself a subsidiary may not be fully reflected by its own subsidiaries but rather by the full range of subsidiaries of its GUO. As such, in all relevant instances, we have coded all three of our indicators for both the specific bank (what we call direct subsidiaries) and its GUO (GUO subsidiaries). We use GUO data as a robustness test for our main results. Details are presented in ‘Appendix’. Control Variables First, we include an indicator measuring Bank assets, a commonly used proxy for firm size (Bernhagen and Mitchell 2009, 159; Ehrlich and Jones 2016, 478) as well as lobbying resources (Beyers and Kerremans 2012, 266). Using the Orbis database, Bank assets were collected for each bank in

8  Note that HHI usually ranges from 0 (extreme diversity) to 1 (extreme concentration). However, these values have been reversed to make this indicator more intuitive relative to our other measures of International Scope.

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our data set and for the year prior to the year of each EU and BCBS consultation. Since our dependent variable collapses the time dimension of our data, we calculated the average assets for all years in the data set. Banks assets are recorded in millions of US dollars (USD) and, following established practice (Marshall and Bernhagen 2017, 991), are log-­transformed to normalise distribution. Second, Regulatory exposure is a measure of the extent to which banks are targeted by the Basel III and CRR-CRDIV regulations. A critical aspect of these new regulations is how they sought to target the breadth of banks’ financial activities, ranging from traditional banking activities, like receiving of deposits and extending of credit, to activities that are often provided by so-called universal banks, like managing investment and securities portfolios as well as insurance/reinsurance services. Using Orbis, we coded the full list of financial services offered by each bank in our data set. This indicator ranges from a minimum of one service to a maximum of six. Third, we include a variable for the Domestic regulatory regime. This is measured using data from Barth, Caprio, and Levine’s Bank Regulation and Supervision database (2006), which provides a comprehensive, comparative overview of banking regulations in 125 countries around the globe. To measure Domestic regulatory regime, we used the variable ‘Overall restrictions on banks’ activities’, which ranks a bank’s ability to engage in securities, insurance, and real estate activities according to domestic regulation on a scale ranging from 1 = unrestricted (‘a full range of activities can be conducted directly by banks’) to 4 = prohibited (‘none of these activities can be done in either banks or subsidiaries, or in another part of a common holding company or parent’). Fourth, Domestic access points is a measure of the degree to which non-state stakeholders have opportunities to be involved in domestic legislative processes. Data are taken from the Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance project,9 which explores the interactions of governments with non-state actors when shaping regulations that affect the business community. The data are organised across a range of 15 questions gauging the number (and quality) of opportunities for involvement open to non-state stakeholdersx. Each question is coded as a binary variable (1 = the presence of a specific mechanism or platform for involvement). We operationalise Domestic access point as a simple count of positive answers to these opportunities. Higher values equate to more domestic access points. A full list of the questions used is

https://rulemaking.worldbank.org/ [last accessed 22.5.2019]

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presented in ‘Appendix’. Fifth, Financial freedom is an indicator of banking efficiency, as well as a measure of independence from government control and interference in the financial sector developed for the Index of Economic Freedom.10 The index scores an economy’s financial freedom on a scale of 0–100, where higher scores reflect minimal government interference and regulation and low scores reflect repressive regimes, where supervision and regulation are designed to prevent private financial institutions from functioning. The expectation is that banks situated in countries with higher scores are satisfied with the domestic status quo and are therefore less likely to elevate their advocacy efforts to the global level. Sixth, GDP growth is a measure of the per cent change in GDP from one year to the next and data are derived from World Bank Development Indicators. As Eising et  al. (2017, 963) explain, we can expect that ‘actors situated in wealthier contexts find it easier to participate in consultations’ at multiple levels. Finally, we include three binary control variables: (1) EU bank = 1 if the bank’s home country is also a member of the EU; (2) BCBS member = 1 if the bank is from one of the BCBS’s 27 member countries but also not an EU bank; and (3) BCBS member general = if the bank is from one of the BCBS’s 27 member countries, including EU banks. As there is a high degree of correlation between EU bank and BCBS member general, we only use ‘BCBS member general’ as a robustness test in ‘Appendix’. Summary statistics for all of our indicators are available in ‘Appendix’.

Analysis In what follows, we estimate a series of regression analyses to test the relative explanatory power of our hypothesis. Since our dependent variable, Venue shopping, has three categories indicating lobbying in the EU only, BCBS only, and the EU and BCBS, we use multinomial logistic regression (Eising et  al. 2017, 970 take a similar approach). We take lobbying the BCBS only as our reference category since it is the largest category and since our main interest is lobbying both venues. Importantly, since our data have a multilevel structure with explanatory variables at the country level, we cluster standard errors by country (Jayatillake et  al. 2011). Results,

https://www.heritage.org/index/ [last accessed 22.5.2019].

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Table 7.1  Multinomial logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping EU only (1) Number of subsidiaries (log)

EU and BCBS (2)

(3)

0.824

(5)

(6)

1.286

(0.161) Reach

(4)

(0.172) 0.991 (0.0180)

Diversity

1.031* (0.0151)

1.100 (0.145) 1.003 (0.210) 1.672

1.163 (0.177) 0.974 (0.178) 1.234

0.618 (0.687) 1.119 (0.184) 0.958 (0.181) 1.262

(0.981) 0.952

(0.790) 1.002

(0.862) 0.962

(0.610) 1.297*

(0.525) 1.281*

(0.606) 1.440*

Observations LL P McFadden R2 McFadden adj. R2 BIC

(0.121) 1.172* (0.0868) 0.669** (0.0870) 32.09** (40.10) 4.151 (4.235) 142 − 85.53 0.000 0.346 0.117 − 383.98 1.627

(0.151) 1.112 (0.0786) 0.710** (0.0843) 24.85* (32.01) 4.578 (4.348) 129 − 79.169 0.000 0.326 0.071 − 322.783 1.693

(0.151) 1.045 (0.0490) 0.792 (0.135) 3.866 (3.061) 8.011 (10.14) 142 − 85.53 0.000 0.346 0.117 − 383.98

AIC

(0.126) 1.107 (0.0733) 0.690** (0.0824) 21.84* (26.34) 6.138 (6.057) 136 − 80.212 0.000 0.345 0.100 − 360.317 1.621

(0.141) 1.033 (0.0459) 0.860 (0.137) 3.969 (3.234) 8.368 (10.87) 136 − 80.212 0.000 0.345 0.100 − 360.317 1.621

(0.214) 1.033 (0.0419) 0.850 (0.144) 3.667 (3.052) 13.30 (18.94) 129 − 79.169 0.000 0.326 0.071 − 322.783 1.693

Bank assets (log) Regulatory exposure Domestic regulatory regime Domestic access points Financial freedom GDP growth EU banks BCBS member

1.524 (0.347) 0.767 (0.153) 1.145

1.489 (0.307) 0.808 (0.159) 0.913

8.040** (6.505) 1.606 (0.392) 0.830 (0.146) 1.189

1.627

Relative risk ratios with standard errors in parentheses; reference category is ‘BCBS only’ *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

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presented in Table 7.1, are organised around six models, and are presented as relative risk ratios of the coefficients, indicating ‘how the risk of the outcome falling in the comparison group compared to the risk of the outcome falling in the reference group changes with each variable in question’.11 Relative risk ratios greater than 1 indicate an increase in the risk of the outcome falling in the comparison group relative to the reference group, and ratios less than 1 the opposite. Strong support for our hypothesis can be seen in models 5 and 6. For Reach of subsidiaries, we can see that with each additional country in which a bank owns at least one subsidiary, the relative risk of a bank engaging in global venue shopping (i.e. lobbying both the EU and the BCBS) increases by a factor of 1.031, given that other indicators in the model are held constant. In other words, banks with more subsidiaries in more countries are more likely to engage in global venue shopping. The strongest results are for Diversity of subsidiaries in model 6, where we can see an increase in the relative risk of global venue shopping by a factor of 8.04. The overall diversity of countries in which firms have subsidiaries has an important impact on the choice to engage in global venue shopping. Only the results for Number of subsidiaries, in model 4, appear to show no significant differences in the model. However, this does not speak against our hypothesis insofar as Number of subsidiaries may only indirectly measure the extent to which banks operate across national borders and in different regulatory jurisdictions. Results in Model 1–3 also support our hypothesis insofar as the three indicators for international scope show no significant differences in the models. Lobbying the EU only, in other words, is not predicted by international scope. Plotting marginal effects for our three indicators for International scope, as presented in Fig. 7.1, gives us further insight into our hypothesis and a more intuitive way to compare our three categories: lobbying the EU only, BCBS only, or lobbying both venues. Number of subsidiaries has a considerable impact on the decision to engage in global venue shopping, with the probability of lobbying both the EU and BCBS increasing by more than 40% as the logarithm of the number of banks’ subsidiaries increases from 1 to about 10—or, in real-­ world terms, from 1 subsidiary (like Navistar International) to over 9000 (like Blackrock). This effect stands in contrast to the probability of lobbying only one venue. In fact, we can see that having more subsidiaries is https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/output/multinomial-­logistic-­regression/.

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Fig. 7.1  Marginal effects of the three dimensions of international scope on global venue shopping. Note: Based on estimations in models 4, 5, and 6. The solid lines depict the marginal effects on the dependent variable. Dotted lines depict confidence intervals

related to a decrease in the probability of lobbying the EU only and the BCBS only. For Reach of subsidiaries, we see the probability of global venue shopping increasing by more than 50% when we compare banks with subsidiaries located in just one country (e.g. Canadian Western Bank) to banks with subsidiaries located in nearly 80 different countries (e.g. BNP Paribas or Deutsche Bank AG). Finally, for Diversity of subsidiaries, the probability of global venue shopping increases by about 30% as the diversity of countries in which banks’ subsidiaries are located increases. Put differently, banks like Standard Chartered with 410 subsidiaries in 54 different countries and with very high diversity scores of close to 1 are more likely to engage in global venue shopping than a bank like Länsförsäkringar that, despite having 85 subsidiaries, has them concentrated in just three different countries and therefore has a low diversity score of about 0.14. It is important to note that our findings for the effects of International scope are not just a proxy for a resource-based explanation of venue

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shopping. First, our regression models give little support to the widely held assumption that assets enhance firms’ lobbying capacities and allow them to engage with decision-makers at multiple venues of government. Moreover, and perhaps most telling, variance comparison tests between all three indicators for International scope and Bank assets show that we can confidently reject the null hypothesis that the standard deviations are the same. While resources may be important in other aspects of lobbying (i.e. lobbying success), the extent of banks’ international financial activities is key in explaining patterns of venue shopping. Regression results reveal some interesting findings for several control variables. First, results for Domestic access points challenge the assumption that groups already involved in national decision-making processes are less likely to get involved at other levels of governance. In fact, we find the opposite: groups that already enjoy a greater number of domestic access points will be more likely to venue shop. One important caveat is that we are not able to include bank mobilisation at the national level in this analysis. Instead, our focus is on global venue shopping between the EU and the BCBS. Our results are only able to tell us that banks from countries that tend to provide more opportunities for consultation have also engaged in EU and BCBS consultations. Hence, one explanation could be that banks accustomed to consultation processes in their home states have an easier time mobilising for consultations at the global level. Alternatively, our results could reflect existing biases in national consultation processes. Powerful banks enjoy privileged access at home and are also those that tend to lobby at the global level. A final control variable to consider is EU banks. As expected, models 1–3 suggest that banks from EU member states also tend to be more likely to lobby the EU only. This result is consistent across all three models. Moreover, EU banks are not an important determinant of lobbying both venues. This result might be reflecting the fact that EU rules (CRR and CRDIV) are strongly impacted by Basel rules, but not vice versa. The EU has traditionally ‘downloaded’ and adapted Basel rules into the EU context. Moreover, EU banking rules, especially those that take the form of EU regulations (which is the case for the CRR), are directly translated into national law. Basel rules, by contrast, have no direct legal bearing on Basel members (Chalmers 2017, 110f).

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Conclusions Our contribution has sought to assess the determinants of global venue shopping. Relaxing assumptions about a home-state bias in the choice to venue shop, we have tailored our explanation to the conditions that banks, and for that matter, an increasing number of multinational firms, face in an ever-globalising world. Faced with multiple venues of governance as well as overlapping and sometimes competing international regulatory jurisdictions, firms’ lobbying activities are stretched well beyond domestic decision-making institutions. And indeed, firms with considerable international business activities and substantial international investments in a host of different countries face new venue shopping opportunities and challenges. Our central argument, focusing on bank lobbying, was that the extent of these international activities and investments matters. This is not to say that many existing explanations for venue shopping are no longer relevant. Firm characteristics, venue characteristics, and issue characteristics are still important determinants of venue shopping. Our point was that these factors only tell us part of the story when we shift our attention to global venue shopping. And indeed, our regression results support our central argument: banks with a larger number of subsidiaries spread over a larger and more diverse number of different countries are more likely to engage in global venue shopping strategies. Our analysis was based on a case study of post-crisis banking regulation in two global venues and constituted a most-likely case for our theory. However, our aim was to present a framework applicable to global venue shopping more generally speaking as well to firms operating outside of finance. Future studies could take our lead by holding the policy context constant but applying our framework to different global venues. Additionally, one fruitful and important direction for future research would be to examine venue shopping across a broader range of global governance institutions that excludes regional integration projects. For example, in the case of internet governance, scholars could examine firm-­level lobbying patterns in ICANN and the Internet Governance Forum. These studies could also do more to account for differences in global venue characteristics, especially when regional integration projects are not considerable. In particular, one could consider variations in the decision-­making autonomy of these global governance institutions, as well as their formal legal purview (Tables 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, and 7.8).

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Appendix Table 7.2  Multinomial logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping using BCBS member general EU only (1) Number of subsidiaries (log)

EU and BCBS (2)

(3)

0.864

Regulatory exposure Domestic regulatory regime Domestic access points Financial freedom GDP growth BCBS member general Observations LL P McFadden R2 McFadden adj. R2 BIC AIC

(6)

(0.169) 0.988 (0.0184)

Diversity Bank assets (log)

(5)

1.308*

(0.157) Reach

(4)

1.031* (0.0131)

1.041 (0.128) 0.967

1.119 (0.158) 0.977

0.378 (0.428) 1.077 (0.155) 0.947

1.381 (0.302) 0.766

1.362 (0.259) 0.814

5.492* (4.252) 1.470 (0.352) 0.841

(0.217) 0.546

(0.185) 0.593

(0.173) 0.529

(0.135) 0.780

(0.141) 0.673

(0.126) 0.893

(0.414) 0.930

(0.435) 1.001

(0.397) 0.937

(0.449) 1.249

(0.408) 1.253

(0.470) 1.393*

(0.171) 1.025 (0.0335) 0.607*** (0.0844) 0.989

(0.175) 1.014 (0.0377) 0.593*** (0.0823) 0.523

(0.182) 1.013 (0.0372) 0.608*** (0.0911) 0.751

(0.180) 0.990 (0.0368) 0.717* (0.103) 0.832

(0.177) 0.987 (0.0334) 0.753* (0.103) 0.671

(0.225) 0.991 (0.0338) 0.746* (0.106) 0.477

(0.906) 142 − 95.245 0.000 0.272 0.066 − 379.429 1.722

(0.450) 136 − 88.787 0.000 0.275 0.054 − 357.905 1.703

(0.731) 129 − 88.128 0.000 0.250 0.020 − 319.444 1.785

(1.004) 142 − 95.245 0.000 0.272 0.066 − 379.429 1.722

(0.792) 136 − 88.787 0.000 0.275 0.054 − 357.905 1.703

(0.639) 129 − 88.128 0.000 0.250 0.020 − 319.444 1.785

Relative risk ratios with standard errors in parentheses; reference category is ‘BCBS only’ *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

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Table 7.3  Multinomial logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping using GUO data EU only (1) Number of GUO subsidiaries (log) Reach (GUO)

EU and BCBS (2)

0.927

Regulatory exposure Domestic regulatory regime Domestic access points Financial freedom GDP growth EU banks BCBS member Observations LL P McFadden R2 McFadden adj. R2 BIC AIC

(4)

(5)

(6)

1.858**

(0.161)

(0.362) 0.968* (0.0150)

Diversity (GUO) Bank assets (log)

(3)

1.036* (0.0145)

0.983 (0.170) 0.997

1.055 (0.144) 0.939

0.0642 (0.0937) 1.049 1.462** (0.125) (0.214) 0.826 0.737*

(0.190) 1.433

(0.187) 1.535

(0.165) 1.316

(0.107) 0.858

(0.122) 0.897

(0.124) 1.115

(0.874) 1.054

(0.859) 1.089

(0.793) 1.030

(0.496) 1.656**

(0.524) 1.418*

(0.587) 1.522*

(0.188) 1.095 (0.0974) 0.628** (0.104) 14.82* (15.86) 6.436 (8.644) 119 66.317 0.000 0.419 0.156 − 292.709 1.619

(0.170) 1.072 (0.0831) 0.608** (0.106) 12.54** (12.04) 6.463 (8.816) 120 − 67.898 0.000 0.412 0.152 − 295.078

(0.199) 1.039 (0.0698) 0.563** (0.104) 11.00* (11.50) 4.263 (5.719) 117 − 69.667 0.000 0.388 0.124 − 274.976 1.704

(0.323) 1.060 (0.0611) 0.810 (0.141) 5.132 (4.317) 3.869 (5.435) 119 66.317 0.000 0.419 0.156 − 292.709 1.619

(0.225) 1.074 (0.0597) 0.822 (0.147) 5.099* (4.222) 2.735 (3.380) 120 − 67.898 0.000 0.412 0.152 − 295.078

(0.272) 1.063 (0.0513) 0.808 (0.142) 4.095 (3.334) 3.281 (4.272) 117 − 69.667 0.000 0.388 0.124 − 274.976 1.704

1.632

1.485** (0.204) 0.777

6.860* (6.278) 1.695* (0.394) 0.765

1.632

Relative risk ratios with standard errors in parentheses; reference category is ‘BCBS only’ *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

Table 7.4  Logistic regression analysis of the impact of international scope on global venue shopping (1) Number of subsidiaries (log) Reach Diversity Bank assets (log) Regulatory exposure Domestic regulatory regime Domestic access points Financial freedom GDP growth EU banks BCBS member Observations LL LR ,r 2 (9) Pseudo R2

(2)

(3)

1.382* (0.220) 1.037* (0.0151) 1.438 (0.360) 0.787 (0.154) 1.107 (0.563) 1.320** (0.119) 1.018 (0.0370) 0.937 (0.138) 2.975 (2.014) 3.064 (2.927) 143 − 55.137 48.885 0.307

1.393 (0.309) 0.834 (0.160) 0.899 (0.490) 1.288** (0.118) 1.015 (0.0360) 1.007 (0.146) 3.235 (2.298) 3.122 (3.025) 137 − 53.059 47.409 0.308

8.838** (6.765) 1.557 (0.417) 0.870 (0.142) 1.189 (0.557) 1.480** (0.176) 1.019 (0.0338) 0.978 (0.157) 2.958 (2.069) 5.474 (6.043) 130 − 54.304 40.803 0.273

Odds ratios with clustered standard errors in parentheses; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

Table 7.5  Summary statistics

Venue shopping Venue shopping binary Number of subsidiaries (log) Reach of subsidiaries Diversity of subsidiaries Bank assets (log) Regulatory exposure Domestic regulatory regime Domestic access points Financial freedom GDP growth EU members BCBS member BCBS members general

Obs

Mean

SD

Min

218 218 176 166 159 188 218 183 212 212 212 214 218 214

2.01 0.20 3.67 17.41 0.53 17.84 3.68 2.14 11.59 71.77 1.46 0.51 0.09 0.81

0.62 0.40 2.51 22.41 0.33 2.79 1.88 0.70 2.47 7.67 2.91 0.50 0.28 0.39

1 0 0 0 0.1 9.90 1 1 3 50.5 − 8.26 0 0 0

Max 3 1 9.18 85 1.08 22.21 6 3.66 15 88.41 15.24 1 1 1

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Table 7.6  List of questions used from the global indicators of regulatory governance data set #

Question

1 Have there been any recent reforms that have had an impact on the rulemaking process in your jurisdiction—including notification, publication of proposed regulations, consultation or public comment mechanisms, and/or regulatory impact assessment practices? 2 Do ministries or regulatory agencies in your jurisdiction develop forward regulatory plans—that is, a public list of anticipated regulatory changes or proposals intended to be adopted/implemented in your jurisdiction within a specified time frame? 3 Does the government publish regular reports on regulatory reforms? 4 Is there a practice of ‘pre-consultation’ with the public? (Pre-consultation includes an invitation by the regulator to interested stakeholders to engage in the ‘early thinking’ on how to address an identified problem, before the preparation of a draft regulation.) 5 Is pre-consultation open to the general public? 6 Are the results of the pre-consultation made publicly available? 7 Do ministries or regulatory agencies in your jurisdiction publish the text or summary of proposed (not yet adopted) regulations before their enactment? 8 Do ministries or regulatory agencies in your jurisdiction have the legal obligation to publish the text of proposed regulations before their enactment? 9 Do ministries or regulatory agencies in your jurisdiction solicit comments on proposed (not yet adopted) regulations from the general public? 10 Do ministries or regulatory agencies in your jurisdiction report on the results of the consultation on proposed regulations? 11 Do ministries or regulatory agencies in your jurisdiction conduct an impact assessment of proposed (not yet adopted) regulations? 12 Can affected parties request reconsideration or appeal adopted regulations to the relevant administrative agency? 13 Is there any existing requirement that regulations be periodically reviewed to see whether they are still needed or should be revised? 14 Are the laws that are currently in effect available in a single place? 15 Are the regulations that are currently in effect codified and available in a single place?

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Table 7.7  List of banks Number

Bank name

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

ABN AMRO ABSA Bank Achmea Holding Agricultural Bank of China Airdrie Savings Bank Alliance Bank Allied Irish Banks Ally Financial Inc. American Express American Honda Finance Corporation Amundi ANZ (Australia and New Zealand) Banking Group APG Asset Management Arab Banking Corporation ASX (Australian Securities Exchange) Group Aviva Investors AXA Investment Managers Bancaja Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Banco Bradesco Banco cooperativo de Espania Banco de Credito del Perú Banco Poplare Verona Bangkok Bank Bank Al Khair Bank für Arbeit und Wirtschaft und Österreichische Postsparkasse Aktiengesellschaft Bank Nederlandse Gemeenten Bank of America Merrill Lynch Bank of China Bank of Communications Bank of England Bank of Estonia Bank of Finland Bank of Montreal Bank of New York Mellon Bank of Slovenia Bank of Spain Bank of Thailand Bank-ABC Islamic Banque de France Banque populaires et Caisses d’épargne (BPCE) Barclays

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

(continued)

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Table 7.7 (continued) Number

Bank name

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

BCC Sala di Cesenatico Black Sea Trade and Development Bank BlackRock BNP Paribas Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME) Clearing BPI France BRE Bank Brevan Howard Investment Products BT Pension Scheme Bulgarian National Bank Caja de Ingenieros Cambridge-Counties Bank Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Canadian Derivatives Clearing Corporation Canadian Western Bank Cardano Cargill Carmax Business Services Central Bank of Bahrain Central Bank of Barbados Central Bank of Hungary (Magyar Nemzeti Bank) Č eskoslovenská obchodní banka (CSOB) Chicago Board Options Exchange Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group Inc China Construction Bank China Merchants Bank CIMB THAI Citigroup Clearing Corporation of India Ltd Clearing House (The) (TCH) Close Brothers Clydesdale Bank CME Group CNH Capital LLC Commerzbank Commonwealth Bank of Australia Conseil Optimum Heuristique Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) Bank International Council of Europe Development Bank Coventry Building Society Crédit Agricole Credit Benchmark (continued)

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Table 7.7 (continued) Number

Bank name

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

Credit Foncier Credit Mutuel Credit Suisse AG Currency Exchange Fund (The) (TCX) Czech National Bank (CNB) Danmarks Nationalbank (National Bank of Denmark) DBS Bank Ltd (Singapore) Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) Deutsche Bank AG Deutsche Börse Group Dexia Dutch Central Bank Ecology Building Society Endurian Erste Group Bank Eskan Bank—Bahrain Eurex Clearing Euroclear European Bank for Reconstruction and Development European Central Counterparty Limited (EuroCCP) European Commodity Clearing AG European Multilateral Clearing Facility Fidelity International FirstRand Bank Ford Motor Credit Company General Electric Capital General Motors Financial Company Genworth Financial Goldman Sachs Gordian Knot Group Credit Libanais Groupe BPCE HSBC Hyundai Capital America ICAP (former ‘Intercaptial’) Industrial Bank Co Ltd Industrial Bank of Korea (Seoul) ING Financial Markets ING Group Insight Investment Instituto de Credito Oficial Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) (continued)

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Table 7.7 (continued) Number

Bank name

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

International Finance Corporation (IFC) Intesa San Paolo Japan Post Bank Japan Securities Clearing Corporation Johannesburg Stock Exchange JPMorgan Chase & Co Juroku Bank KAS BANK Kasikorn Bank KB Kookmin Bank KBC Groep NV KDPW Kommunalbanken Norway Kommuninvest Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) Kuwait Finance House la Caixa Länsförsäkringar AB Lloyds Banking Group London Clearing House (LCH) Clearnet Group London Stock Exchange Group Macquarie Bank LTD Magyar Nemzeti Bank (Hungary Central Bank) Malayan Banking Berhad Markit Group Limited Mediobanca di Credito Finanziario SA Mediterranean Bank Mercedes-Benz Financial Services MetLife Morgan Stanley Municipal Employees’ Retirement System of Michigan Municipality Finance plc National Australia Bank Ltd National Bank of Georgia Nationwide Building Society Navistar Financial Corporation Nedbank Group Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation Nomura Nordea Bank AB Norges Bank Northern Trust (continued)

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Table 7.7 (continued) Number

Bank name

169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180

OMIClear OneSavings Bank Österreichishe Nationalbank (OeNB) Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) Bank Pacific Coast Bankers Bancshares (PCBB) Paragon People’s Bank of China PGGM Porsche Financial Services Rabo AgriFinance Rabobank Raiffeisen Bank International AG/Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG Rand Merchant Bank Raphaels Bank Renault Crédit International (RCI) Banque Reserve Bank of New Zealand RESIMAC Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Santander Schroders PLC Scotiabank Secure Trust Bank Shinkumi Federation Bank Singapore Exchange (SGX) Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) Skipton Building Society Societe de Financement Local Société Générale South African Bank of Athens Standard Bank Group Standard Chartered Bank State Street Swedish Export Credit Corporation Swiss Infrastructure and Exchange (SIX) Securities Services Swiss Life TD Bank (Canada) Toyota Motor Credit Corporation UBS UniCredit Union Asset Management Unipol Gruppo Finanziario United Overseas Bank

181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210

(continued)

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Table 7.7 (continued) Number

Bank name

211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218

Volkswagen Bank GmbH Volkswagen Financial Services AG VTB Capital VW Credit, Inc. Wells Fargo & Company Westpac Banking Corporation Woori Bank Yorkshire Building Society

Table 7.8  Test for multicollinearity

Variable

Number of subsidiaries (log) Reach of subsidiaries Diversity of subsidiaries Bank assets (log) Regulatory exposure Domestic regulatory regime Domestic access points Financial freedom GDP growth EU banks BCBS member

Variance inflation factor (VIF) 5.27 5.07 1.93 1.62 1.32 1.74 1.6 1.77 1.94 2.06 1.43

Figure 7.2 presents stark differences across banks when we compare global venue shopping (lobbying in the EU and BCBS) to lobbying in just one venue. Banks engaged in global venue shopping have a much larger number of subsidiaries (Number of subsidiaries) and have many more subsidiaries in a larger (Reach of subsidiaries) and more diverse range of countries (Diversity of subsidiaries). ANOVA tests show statistically significant differences in the means for all three indicators. See Figs. 7.3 and 7.4.

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Fig. 7.2  Box and whisker plot of banks’ international scope

Fig. 7.3  Marginal effects of international scope on global venue shopping for EU banks lobbying the EU only

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Fig. 7.4  Marginal effects of international scope on global venue shopping for BCBS banks lobbying the BCBS only

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References Baroni, Laura, et  al. 2014. Defining and Classifying Interest Groups. Interest Groups & Advocacy 3 (2): 141–159. https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2014.9. Barth, James R., Garth Caprio Jr., and Ross Levine. 2006. Rethinking Bank Regulation: Till Angels Govern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baumgartner, Frank R., and Beth L. Leech. 1998. Basic Interests. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bernhagen, Patrick, and Neil J.  Mitchell. 2009. The Determinants of Direct Corporate Lobbying in the European Union. European Union Politics 10 (2): 155–176. Beyers, Jan, and Bart Kerremans. 2012. Domestic Embeddedness and the Dynamic of Multilevel Venue Shopping in Four EU Member States. Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 25 (2): 263–290. Cerny, Philip G. 2010. Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, Adam William. 2017. When Banks Lobby: The Effects of Organizational Characteristics and Banking Regulations on International Bank Lobbying. Business and Politics 19 (1): 107–134. ———. 2019. Unity and Conflict: Explaining Financial Industry Lobbying Success in European Union Public Consultations. Regulation & Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12231. Cohn, Theodore H. 2016. Global Political Economy. New York: Routledge. Constantelos, John. 2010. Playing the Field: Federalism and the Politics of Venue Shopping in the United States and Canada. Publius The Journal of Federalism 40 (3): 460–483. Culpepper, Pepper D. 2011. Quiet Politics and Business Power. Corporate Control in Europe and Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Howard, and David Green. 2008. Global Financial Regulation. Cambridge: Polity. Dür, Andreas, and Gemma Mateo. 2016. Insiders versus Outsiders. Interest Group Politics in Multilevel Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ehrlich, Sean D., and Eryn Jones. 2016. Whom Do European Corporations Lobby? The Domestic Institutional Determinants of Interest Group Activity in the European Union. Business and Politics 18 (4): 467–488. Eising, Rainer, et al. 2017. Who Says What to Whom? Alignments and Arguments in EU Policy-Making. West European Politics 40 (5): 957–980. Farrell, Henry, and Abraham L.  Newman. 2014. The New Politics of Interdependence. Cross-National Layering in Trans-Atlantic Regulatory Disputes. Comparative Political Studies 48 (4): 497–526.

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CHAPTER 8

When Do Refugees Matter? The Importance of Issue Salience for Digital Advocacy Organizations Nina Hall

Introduction The Internet era has led to the development of new advocacy organizations. In the last 20 years, new groups have emerged which take advantage of digital platforms and social media in order to campaign. These organizations include MoveOn in the USA, Campact in Germany, 38 Degrees in the UK, GetUp! in Australia, ActionStation in New Zealand, and #aufstehn in Austria. These organizations represent a new generation of digital advocacy organization, which is member-driven, multi-issue, and committed to progressive change (Hall and Ireland 2016; Hall 2022).

N. Hall (*) Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 L. M. Dellmuth, E. A. Bloodgood (eds.), Advocacy Group Effects in Global Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27864-8_8

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These organizations have large and growing memberships: Avaaz has 47  million members worldwide,1 GetUp! over 1  million members, and Campact almost 2 million members. Moreover, they are successfully mobilizing their members online and on the streets. In Germany, Campact co-­ organized a demonstration of 250,000 people to push for action on climate change at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bonn in December 2017. GetUp! in Australia has mobilized thousands to take part in vigils for refugee rights, and MoveOn helped mobilize people to campaign against Trump’s so-called immigration ban in January 2017. Politicians and media recognize the influence of these digital advocacy organizations. GetUp!, for example, has been the subject of a Senate Inquiry (Murphy 2016), and was listed as one of the top ten most powerful actors in Australia by the Australian Financial Review (Australian Associated Press 2017). Although there is an emerging interest group scholarship on these organizations (Fraussen and Halpin 2017), we know relatively little about how these organizations select their campaigns, and when they successfully mobilize the public on international issues. This is partly because the existing scholarship has focused on individual digital advocacy organizations within their national context. Thus, we have a rich understanding of MoveOn’s effect in the USA (Karpf 2012), GetUp!’s contribution to progressive change in Australia (Vromen 2017), and 38 Degrees’ distinctive style of campaigning in the UK (Chadwick and Dennis 2016). There have been few—if any—comparative, cross-national studies of how these digital advocacy organizations select campaigns.2 Furthermore, IR scholars, who have long studied transnational advocacy efforts, have paid scant attention to these new digital advocacy organizations. The IR literature tends to focus on the large, established non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as Oxfam, Greenpeace, Transparency International, and Human Rights Watch, which they suggest have the most authority to influence states’ positions (Stroup and Wong 2017). Moreover, IR scholars concentrate principally on transnational advocacy at international summits, rather than on domestic advocacy on 1  Avaaz, ‘About Us’, https://secure.avaaz.org/page/en/community/. Last Accessed 23 January 2019. 2  The author is not aware of any existing scholarship that compares cross-nationally digital advocacy organizations that follow the particular model of advocacy outlined here.

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international issues (Hadden 2015; Hanegraaff et al. 2016; Tallberg et al. 2018). Yet, most NGO advocacy and interest group actions target national decision-makers, rather than international institutions (Bloodgood and Clough 2016; Chap. 1). This is because ‘domestic political change is closer to home and more directly addressed’, and so activists ‘will concentrate actions there’ (Sikkink 2005). The ‘boomerang model’ is never the optimum form of political activism but rather ‘a complement and compensatory option’ when advocacy efforts are blocked domestically (Sikkink 2005). IR scholars should understand when and why digital advocacy organizations successfully mobilize people to campaign on international issues, and not solely focus on transnational advocacy targeting global governance institutions. As a first step towards this research agenda, this chapter draws on interest group and IR scholarship to examine how digital advocacy organizations select the issues they campaign on. This chapter analyses how digital advocacy organizations in Austria, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the USA, and the UK responded in 2015 to the so-called refugee crisis. In 2015, an increasing number of asylum seekers crossed the Mediterranean into Europe. Although there were clear differences in proximity to refugee flows between the countries studied here, there was heightened media attention and public interest worldwide to refugee issues during this time. This chapter offers insights into campaign decision-making in digital advocacy organizations, by studying a group of similar organizations during the same external crisis in 2015. The chapter builds on three years of primary research with an international network of digital advocacy organizations: the Online Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN).3 As will be described in the next section, the member organizations of OPEN all share the same model: they use digital platforms to mobilize citizens and put pressure on decision-makers across multiple issues. The author has attended six closed workshops with digital activists from the OPEN network and has visited the headquarters of 38 Degrees (UK), GetUp! (Australia), #aufstehn (Austria), and ActionStation (New Zealand), and observed their offline operations and 3  The OPEN network includes national digital advocacy organizations operating in Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA, and the UK.  OPEN, OPEN Network. https://www.the-open.net/network/. Last viewed 24 July 2018.

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decision-making procedures. In addition, the author has interviewed over one hundred individuals (digital activists, traditional NGOs, donors, journalists, and experts) to understand the distinctiveness of this form of advocacy organization. This particular chapter directly cites twelve interviews, which are listed in the appendix, on these organizations’ refugee campaigns. This deep empirical research is the basis of a cross-national comparison of how digital advocacy organizations select their campaigns. The chapter draws on existing political communications, interest groups, and IR scholarship to explain how digital advocacy organizations differ from traditional advocacy organizations established in the pre-­ Internet era. Scholars have suggested digital advocacy organizations regularly survey and track their members’ preferences, and select campaigns that receive the most member support. This mode of member-driven ‘analytic activism’ (Karpf 2016) is distinct from conventional NGOs where professionals select campaigns based primarily on subject expertise (Stroup and Wong 2017). Here, I argue that digital advocacy organizations select campaigns based on issue salience to members, rather than expert knowledge. This chapter begins by outlining the emergence and defining the distinctive form of digital advocacy organizations. It then examines existing scholarship on how advocacy organizations select campaigns and argues that we would expect digital advocacy organizations to select campaigns based on issue salience, whereas NGOs select campaigns based on their issue-expertise. The chapter then examines these conjectures in the context of digital advocacy campaigns for refugee rights. It concludes by discussing the limitations of this distinctive mode of advocacy and identifies avenues for further research. Overall, it suggests IR scholars should engage with interest group scholarship to understand when, and why, domestic groups successfully mobilize people on international issues.

The Emergence of Digital Advocacy Organizations Today, most advocacy organizations and non-governmental organizations use digital platforms to campaign. However, in recent years, a distinctive, new generation of organizations has emerged that are distinct from traditional NGOs, such as Oxfam or Amnesty International. These organizations are all digital based and use digital technology ‘for accessible, scalable,

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and rapid engagement’ with their members.4 Digital technology enables these organizations to start and switch campaigns regularly from one day to the next (Chadwick and Dennis 2016). However, they are not just digital platforms but are permanent organizations with paid, full-time, professional staff, and physical organizational headquarters and hierarchical structures. Traditional advocacy actors, interest groups, and NGOs lobby and campaign to get an issue on the political agenda, and then continue to campaign in the face of sustained opposition (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Meanwhile, digital advocacy organizations will look for ‘crisitunities’, or political opportunity structures, and launch short campaigns to mobilize a critical mass of people. They seek to ‘bring a surge of power to single-issue campaigns when it matters most’.5 Digital advocacy organizations are also distinct from advocacy organizations which have moral commitment to an issue, such as women’s rights, climate change, or conservation. While traditional NGOs campaign for their cause over a sustained period of time (Stroup and Wong 2017), digital advocacy organizations are multi-issue and can start and stop campaigns rapidly, although they do share a commitment to progressive causes (Hall and Ireland 2016). In fact, digital advocacy organizations can be identified by their nimble, rapid response campaigning style. As the OPEN website explains: ‘When news stories, upcoming legislative decisions, or other events make action urgent, OPEN groups give their members a means to take immediate action. Groups must be decisive and act quickly. OPEN’s member organisations therefore operate in a low-bureaucracy, high-empowerment management model’.6 It is thanks to the low cost and fast dissemination of communicating online that these groups can initiate and switch campaigns so quickly. Digital advocacy organizations describe themselves as ‘people-powered’ and ‘member-led’. They mobilize citizens to pressure decision-makers (outsider strategy) rather than lobbying (insider strategy), to shift political outcomes. Digital advocacy organizations do ‘rigorous testing, response benchmarks, polling, voting, and anecdotal inputs’ to identify member

4   OPEN, OPEN Network. https://www.the-open.net/network/. Last viewed 24 July 2018. 5  Ibid. 6  Ibid.

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preferences, and then select campaigns accordingly.7 Some digital advocacy organizations even enable their members to start and run their own campaigns—through online petition websites—and may allocate staff time and resources to promote member-initiated campaigns. To become a member, one can simply sign a petition and/or subscribe to receive emails, and it is not necessary to pay dues (although members are frequently encouraged to donate) (Fraussen and Halpin 2017). There are now more than twenty digital advocacy organizations operating around the world.8 Table 8.1 below lists many, but not necessarily all, of the groups that should be classified as multi-issue, nimble, member-­ driven, progressive, digital advocacy organizations. It lists the organizations chronologically, according to the date they were established. MoveOn in the USA pioneered this model in 1998, and more recently organizations have been established in Poland, Austria, New Zealand, and South Africa. The table illustrates significant variation in staff size. Larger organizations, such as MoveOn, Avaaz, GetUp!, and Campact, have over 40 staff members, while newer organizations may only have a couple of staff. Annual revenue ranges from over US$22 million (Avaaz) to $90,000 (Uplift, Ireland). Notably many, but not all, are part of the OPEN network. OPEN allows only domestically focused organizations to become members (thus Avaaz and SumofUs, which are international, are not members). OPEN also limits membership to one digital advocacy organization per country (hence Color of Change is not a member, but MoveOn is). This is to avoid competition and enhance trust between OPEN organizations so they can readily share campaigning skills, tactics, and strategies (Table 8.1).

Campaign Decision-making in Advocacy Organizations Scholars have explored how interest groups, NGOs, and transnational advocacy networks decide what issues to campaign on. IR scholars have highlighted the role of inter-network dynamics in transnational advocacy networks (Carpenter 2007) and the degree of centralization of decision-­ making in NGOs (Wong 2012). Interest group scholars argue that the decision to prioritize a particular issue over another is based on internal  Ibid.   International digital advocacy organizations include SumOfUs, 350.org, AllOut, and Avaaz. 7 8

Table 8.1  Digital advocacy organizations (in chronological order from the date of founding) Name

Date of founding

Country

Staff numbersa

Annual revenue in 2015 (US$)b

OPEN affiliatec

MoveOn Campact GetUp! Color of Change Avaaz 38 Degrees LeadNow SumofUs Action Station

1998 2004 2005 2005

USA Germany Australia USA

> 40 > 40 > 40 < 10

$3,257,832d $7,632,647.24e $7,689,578.80f $2,689,280g

Yes Yes Yes No

2007 2009 2010 2011 2014

63 28 < 10 16