How Money, Lobbying Capacity and Group Type Shape Lobbying Influence (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Assessing Inclusion and Diversity in the Policy Process

Abstract

With the effects of climate change becoming more and more discernible, the political dimension of energy transitions naturally come into focus. Not surprisingly, energy and climate politics are deeply entangled with classical political economic questions of power and influence. Any public policy designed to achieve a large-scale transition toward more sustainable energy systems generates winners and losers. The winners of such interventions (e.g., renewable energy companies) have incentives to push governments to adopt ambitious energy transition policies, whereas those who bear the short-term costs (e.g., conventional utilities) have incentives to counteract such efforts. While public policies are ultimately enacted by elected policymakers in democracies, the preceding political process provides ample opportunity for these economic stakeholders and further actors (e.g., civil society groups and industry associations) to exert influence on legislation, for instance via formal consultations and hearings or informal channels of communication. Mindful of recent calls by numerous political scientists to bring this topic center stage within the discipline, this paper examines the politics of climate change by an empirical analysis of policy influence in energy policy-making - what has been considered a central pillar of global climate governance.

More specifically, drawing on existing studies in Political Science and Public Administration, we theorize that stakeholders' policy influence generally depends on various resources they have and the intensity of their policy-related activities. However, those links are not as linear as the literature may have assumed so far. Here, we believe it is important to investigate the following three distinct substantive issues. First, we ask whether economic (financial) resources and lobbying capacity (e.g., personnel following political developments) have distinct effects on the stakeholders' policy influence, after controlling for other actor characteristics. Second, we examine whether these effects vary across different actor types - namely, business and non-business actors. Third, by incorporating information on the connectivity among the actors (measured by their collaboration and information exchange behavior with respect to energy policies), we assess whether a stakeholder manifests a higher level of influence when it is more strongly connected with other influential actors. In other words, we analyze whether information exchanges and collaboration happen as strategic substitute or complement with respect to their policy influence.


To answer these questions empirically, this paper presents analyses of an original dataset based on an in-depth survey of more than 312 stakeholders that have been active in the energy policy domain in Switzerland over the past years. We employ multinomial logistic regressions to answer the first two questions and a tweaked version of spatial logit regressions to answer the third question. In doing so, our paper also contributes to a methodological debate on "policy influence" measures. Our survey dataset is unique in that it contains two policy influence measures - one is self-assessed influence and the second is based on reputation by other stakeholders. What is more, the functioning of the Swiss political consultation process allows us to construct an objective measure of the proximity between a policy proposal and stakeholders’ own policy preference - a measure called "preference attainment" in the literature. By considering preference attainment alongside the two measures of influence, we go beyond existing empirical studies. Our analysis is the first to investigate the relationship between the three possible measures.

Our preliminary results show that what each of the three measures captures is qualitatively different from each other. In the main empirical analysis, in which we chose to employ a composite measure of self-assessed and reputation-based influence as the dependent variable, we find important differences both in the effect of economic resources and that of lobbying capacity, depending on group types in question. Interestingly, economic resources demonstrate little effect on policy influence among business-oriented stakeholders, whereas non-business actors gain policy influence by having more economic resources. Possessing a larger lobbying capacity, on the other hand, significantly increases the policy influence of business actors, whereas it has nearly no effect among non-business actors. The results highlight the need to account for heterogeneous effects between group types and revises common notions regarding the effects of organisational resources on policy influence. Our paper closes with important implications for the study of climate and energy governance.

Authors

• Fintan Damien Oeri, University Basel

• Adrian Rinscheid, University of St.Gallen

• Aya Kachi, University of Basel