Scholarship has investigated the outcomes of such efforts primarily in two distinct research traditions: research on interest groups and that on social movement outcomes. Research on interest groups has focused mainly on the impact of lobbying activities on policy-making in the various stages of the legislative process. Works on social movement outcomes have inquired into the circumstances under which protest activities lead to policy changes. Other works have examined both types of actors as well as political parties.Yet, while these strands of literature yield important insights into the political effects of organized groups in society, we still know little about the individual-level mechanisms of responsiveness and how certain features of MPs, such as their values and democratic conceptualizations, impact on their responsiveness to interest organizations. This has important implications for making sense of democratic practice and the avenues to solve the crisis of responsibility and responsiveness currently afflicting advanced democracies.

While scholars have recently started to examine policy-makers and political representatives’ views about protest activities, research on the individual-level factors conditioning how MPs respond to interest organizations is still sparse. We have tried to redress this state of affairs in a recent article published in Political Studies by examining the following research question: What are the individual-level mechanisms underlying MPs’ responsiveness to interest organizations? To answer this question, we focused on various characteristics of MPs and examined the responsiveness of politicians to interest organizations from an individual-level perspective.

Our analysis, carried on the PARTIREP data, a survey carried amongst MPs at various levels in a number of European countries (http://www.partirep.eu), has focused on how certain attitudes and values may be associated with different measures of responsiveness to interest organizations, including the desirability of involving interest groups in decision-making, the regularity of contexts with interest organizations, and the percentage of initiatives derived from interest and action groups. We investigated more specifically the impact of eight characteristics of MPs: their political values in terms of leftist and libertarian orientations, their reliance on existing ties to groups in society, their party attachment, their views of established institutional democratic processes, their views of popular citizen political involvement, and their support for technocratic involvement. Additionally, we also investigated whether responsiveness varies depending on the type of interest organization concerned, namely whether we are dealing with “old” redistributional or “new” more cultural kinds of issues.

We found evidence that some MP characteristics have a differential impact on responsiveness to different organizations, for example with respect to support for greater involvement of experts in decision-making and in the result that MPs with lower levels of reliance on established ties with groups in society were more likely to be responsive to environmental organizations. Most importantly, we found evidence across types of organizations that MPs with stronger egalitarian and socially liberal political attitudes were more likely to be responsive to interest group organizations.

We also found a strong and consistent effect of MPs’ support for popular citizen involvement in the political process on their responsiveness across indicators. These effects were consistent across both different types of general as well as issue-specific indicators of responsiveness indicating that more leftist and socially liberal MPs that have a popular conception of democratic engagement, seeing the involvement of organized groups of citizens in decision-making as a beneficial and desirable thing are most likely to be responsive. These findings, in turn, suggest that these aspects are critical if we are to resolve the crisis of responsibility and responsiveness currently afflicting advanced democracies. They show that if constituents and organized groups of citizens want to be heard by their representatives they should consider electing and targeting more leftist and socially tolerant representatives who have been shown by this analysis to be more likely to listen to the demands of organized groups of citizens. This is also true of those representatives who feel that the involvement of citizens in policy-making is something which is intrinsically valuable and necessary for healthy democratic government.

Our findings also have a number of important implications for the study of the impact of organized collective efforts to influence policy-making and more generally for the role of citizens in the democratic process. We contribute to the study of the conditions under which interest organizations may gain access to the institutionalized political arenas. In this way, our study provides insights on the role of citizens in the democratic process. Whereas popular democrats think that citizen involvement is not only beneficial but crucial for vibrant democracies, elitist democrats see popular involvement at best as purely useful for legitimating elite decision making and at worse potentially destabilizing. Our analysis suggests that MPs who are more likely to subscribe to the popular view are more likely to be responsive and, as such, that cultivating this ethos within political parties and parliaments will be critical in the future to resolve the crisis of responsiveness and responsibility currently afflicting advanced democracies, and particularly so since the wake of the Great Recession. This is consistent with the notion of associative democracy as supplementing both representative democracy and market economy. As such, knowing the conditions under which policy-makers become more open towards and reliant upon organized groups of the civil society, as well as the mechanisms leading to such openness and reliance, could provide an incentive towards a stronger role of the latter in the public affairs.

Read the full article published in Political Studies here. 

Marco Giugni is a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations and director of the Institute of Citizenship Studies (InCite) at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. 

Maria Grasso is a professor at the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Street Citizens: Protest Politics and Social Movement Activism in the Age of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2018, Forthcoming, with Marco Giugni) and Generations, Political Participation and Social Change in Western Europe (Routledge, 2016).