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Brexit, interest groups and changes to the ‘logic of negotiation’: a research note

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Abstract

Did the Brexit lead to a decline in interest group influence in British government? This research note reports on a survey of 268 public affairs professionals and examines whether the ‘bandwidth’ taken up by Brexit diminished the areas of domestic policy that groups might seek to influence and whether groups found it harder to engage with government in the 3 years up to 2020. The figures indicate that Brexit significantly displaced other domestic issues but that government did not ‘freeze out’ interest groups in the period. Moreover, the evidence points to a growing role for groups post-Brexit.

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Notes

  1. For the public affairs people for associations we looked through lists (from different places including lists of top charities, organisations responding to consultations) and then searched online for the name(s) of their public affairs people. For the public affairs people in consultancies we used the ‘registered Lobbyist’ list from the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists and then went to the relevant organisation in the Public Affairs Board’s Register which lists names of ‘practitioners’, and these people were added to the mailing list (usually guessing email addresses as the organisational style of email addresses is also clear from the register). Many of those on both consultancy and associations lists were likely to be media relations people, it was not always easy to distinguish those working in government relations and we have almost certainly erred heavily on the side of including media relations people were unsure.

  2. Treasury grouping: HM Treasury; Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy; Exiting the European Union; International Trade; UK Export Finance; Competition and Markets Authority; HMRC. Health & Social Care grouping: Health & Social Care; Work & Pensions; Education; Digital, Culture, Media & Sport; Health and Safety Executive. Environment Food & Rural Affairs grouping: Environment Food & Rural Affairs; Food Standards Agency; Transport; Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government; Environment Agency; Forestry Commission. Home Office grouping: Home Office; Ministry of Justice; Attorney General's Office; CPS; National Crime Agency. Non-English departments grouping: Northern Ireland Office; Offices of the Advocate General for Scotland, the Secretary of State for Scotland or the Secretary of State for Wales; Foreign Office grouping: Foreign & Commonwealth Office; Ministry of Defence; International Development; Cabinet Office.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Craig Beaumont (Federation of Small Businesses), James Cooper, Philip Cowley (Queen Mary University of London), Anand Menon (King’s College London) and Tony Travers (LSE) for their help in this research.

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The LSE GV314 Group consists of staff and students in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science following the undergraduate course ‘Empirical Research in Government’ (course code GV314). Involved in this project were Ebla Bohmer, Lara Elmani, Eleanor Frost, Holly Harwood, Alice Jung, Areeba Khan, Gareth Leung, Ross Lloyd, Shamara Lowe-Mbirimi, Edward C Page, Will Priest, Sanjana Suresh and Zachary Wong.

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The LSE GV314 Group. Brexit, interest groups and changes to the ‘logic of negotiation’: a research note. Int Groups Adv 9, 541–551 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-020-00106-9

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