Abstract
Advocacy is typically conceived of as an activity where advocacy groups seek and policymakers grant influence. In this paper, we turn the classic approach to advocacy upside down and ask under what conditions policymakers seek to exert influence on the positions adopted by opposing or allied advocacy groups. Two strategies that policymakers can use in their interactions with advocacy groups are proposed: amplification and persuasion. We build on resource exchange theory and the concept of political opportunity structures to explain which strategy a policymaker uses. 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. Our results demonstrate that, overall, policymakers seek out advocacy groups more when they are faced with increased levels of political pressures. Namely, 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.
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Notes
Interview conducted at the Conference of Parties in Paris, 4 December 2015.
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…”.
See “Annex II” for more information on the issues.
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.
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/worldwide-governance-indicators (accessed 21 August 2018).
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.
Interview conducted at the UNFCCC preparatory meeting in Bonn, June 2015.
Interview conducted at the UNFCCC preparatory meeting in Bonn, June 2015.
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Acknowledgements
Iskander De Bruycker gratefully acknowledges support of the Research Foundation Flanders - FWO (Post doc Grant No. 12N1417N). The authors thank Lisa Dellmuth, Elizabeth Bloodgood and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments which helped improve the article considerably. An earlier version of the article was presented at the special issue's workshop in Stockholm (June 2018). We are grateful to the participants of this workshop for their helpful feedback.
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Appendices
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 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 did 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 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 2 weeks and 4 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 the email addresses were not working.
Annex II—Issues
The interviews and surveys used for this paper 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, thirteen policy issues for the UNFCCC were identified and seventeen for the WTO. Some issues were on the negotiating table in both 2015 and in 2017, while others were only relevant during one of the two interview rounds. In Tables 4 and 5, we present the issues that were discussed at these four conferences.
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) continue 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 | Model II Persuasion | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Coefficient | S.E. | Coefficient | S.E. | |
Explanatory variables | ||||
Salience of issue | 0.571** | (0.223) | 0.477** | (0.229) |
Democratic accountability | 0.463** | (0.189) | 0.155 | (0.198) |
Function | ||||
Politician (ref.) | Ref. | Ref. | ||
Diplomat | − 0.773* | (0.436) | − 1.046** | (0.442) |
Civil servant | − 0.406 | (0.375) | − 0.949** | (0.396) |
Other | 0.110 | (0.462) | − 0.511 | (0.476) |
Control variables | ||||
Level of development | ||||
High income (ref.) | Ref. | Ref. | ||
Medium high income | 0.872** | (0.354) | 0.572 | (0.109) |
Medium low income | 1.023** | (0.452) | 0.494 | (0.308) |
Low income | 1.812*** | (0.482) | 0.786 | (0.116) |
Initiate contact | ||||
Evenly (ref.) | Ref. | Ref. | ||
Advocacy group | − 0.641*** | (0.236) | − 0.241 | (0.237) |
Policymaker | 0.353 | (0.324) | 0.483 | (0.341) |
Diagnostics | ||||
Intercept 1 | − 1.289*** | (0.454) | − 2.749*** | (0.504) |
Intercept 2 | 0.318 | (0.446) | − 0.487 | (0.455) |
Intercept 3 | 1.545*** | (0.454) | 0.858** | (0.453) |
Intercept 4 | 3.684*** | (0.521) | 2.480*** | (0.487) |
Country-level intercept | 0.000 | (0.000) | 0.049 | (0.182) |
Log-likelihood | − 425.445 | − 419.198 | ||
Wald Chi2 (10) | 34 | 20 | ||
Prob > Chi2 | 0.000 | 0.029 | ||
N | 298 | 299 | ||
Robustness check II. Seemingly unrelated regression analysis
Amplification | Persuasion | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Coefficient | S.E. | Coefficient | S.E. | |
Explanatory variables | ||||
Salience of issue | 0.317** | (0.131) | 0.262** | (0.127) |
Democratic accountability | 0.263** | (0.109) | 0.078 | (0.105) |
Function | ||||
Politician (ref.) | Ref. | Ref. | ||
Diplomat | − 0.418* | (0.254) | − 0.581** | (0.245) |
Civil servant | − 0.224 | (0.222) | − 0.476** | (0.215) |
Other | 0.089 | (0.271) | − 0.220 | (0.262) |
Control variables | ||||
Level of development | ||||
High income (ref.) | Ref. | Ref. | ||
Medium high income | 0.489*** | (0.204) | 0.322 | (0.197) |
Medium low income | 0.571** | (0.263) | 0.311 | (0.254) |
Low income | 0.995** | (0.271) | 0.504* | (0.262) |
Initiate contact | ||||
Evenly (ref.) | Ref. | Ref. | ||
Advocacy group | − 0.382*** | (0.137) | − 0.124 | (0.132) |
Policymaker | 0.174 | (0.193) | 0.310 | (0.186)* |
Diagnostics | ||||
Intercept | 2.419*** | (0.258) | − 2.871*** | (0.249) |
R-sq | 0.105 | 0.074 | ||
Chi2 | 34.94 | 23.76 | ||
Prob > Chi2 | 0.000 | 0.008 | ||
N | 297 | 297 | ||
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Lucas, K., Hanegraaff, M. & De Bruycker, I. Lobbying the lobbyists: when and why do policymakers seek to influence advocacy groups in global governance?. Int Groups Adv 8, 208–232 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00050-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00050-3