Who is Successful and Who Is Not? Actors’ Satisfaction with the Policy Output

Abstract

Participatory elements are central to democratic institutions and contribute to the legitimacy of the political system. In particular, the institutions of consensus democracies are designed to accommodate conflict in heterogeneous societies by offering a variety of societal groups access to the political decision-making process (Lijphart 1999). It is, however, not entirely clear if and how preferences are included in political decisions. Intuitively, we would expect that the more an organization participates in the political process, the more occasions it has to present and defend its interests. Yet, the link between access and influence is mediated by many factors, such as an actor’s reputational power, resources, or other informal contact with decision-makers, and in such a way that sometimes (official) participation does not translate into policy influence at all. To disentangle these complex and often hidden mechanisms, this chapter studies the actors’ own evaluations of the policy output. I distinguish between two aspects: first, a more general assessment of the collective benefit — that is, whether the output was a balanced compromise — and second, the more direct benefit for a specific organization.