Suchergebnisse

There are more than 2,000 interest groups in Ireland that play a key role in policy development. This paper explores which of these groups have access to Irish policymaking across various political arenas. It does so by examining original data from 2018, gained through large-N survey research on over 300 active interest groups, including business groups, firms, professional organisations, NGOs, citizen groups and consultancies. The analysis focusses on four key venues of policymaking which lobbyists seek to influence: the media, government departments, the Dáil and state agencies. We find that lobbying access in Ireland is similar to other west European countries, but also different. Organisations with higher organisational capacity and that hire revolving door lobbyists declare more frequent access to almost all arenas. This is similar to existing accounts of bias in lobbying access reported in other countries. However, in contrast to scholarship focussing on other European political systems, access is not biased in favour of economic groups. The analysis fills an important empirical gap in the quantitative study of lobbying and adds an otherwise understudied perspective of non-state actor engagement in Irish politics.

AbstractA substantial aspect of scientific research involves linking concepts to observations using measurements. This exercise has raised questions among researchers of whether or not measurements "truly" and "reliably" capture ideas and observations. We address this question by setting out a methodological standard on how to assess the validity and reliability of measurements. We do this by examining measurements that evaluate public policy, arguing that this topic is gaining increasing attention from political science researchers and policymakers. The analysis concerns measurements of the level of transparency and accountability of lobbying laws, central to recent regulatory policy research. We conduct convergent validation, content validation and reproducibility tests on four indices applied to 13 regulations found worldwide. By doing so, the article provides scholars with an evaluation of measurements of lobbying laws' robustness, while offering methodological and theoretical lessons of value to larger regulatory and public policy scholarship.

The EU has an increasingly significant role in the everyday life of Europe's citizens. This is a direct consequence of the growth and integration of the EU over the last 25 years. What are these policies about? Who is shaping them? These are the questions that this book answers

This paper considers the political activity of economic actors in what we refer to as 'overlap issues.' Such issues consist of two separate, but related, domestic and supranational decisions that are taken at both levels of European governance. Examined here are the domestic level privatisation policy-making processes in Spain, France and Ireland, and the subsequent European Commission decisions on the state aids given during the sales. The research argues that although the influence of economic actors is crucial in understanding the domestic-level privatisation aid negotiations, such actors' participation is absent in the supranational decision-making process that witnessed all the aids being approved. In order to explain this limited political activity of firms at the EU-level, attention is focused on both the role of the member state and the paradoxes in EU policies that simultaneously guide and constrain the Commission from making a decision against capital. The conclusions situate our findings within the 'elite pluralist' literature on economic actors' political activity in Europe while also considering the idea of the structural dependence of the EU on capital.

Many studies of the policy process in Spain use distinct periods as an organising framework for analysis, and this approach implies that the process itself changes according to the different periods in question. However, we argue that this 'periodisation' approach fails to draw an appropriate distinction between policy choices and outcomes, on the one hand, and the policy process on the other. Whereas different policy choices may of course have very different consequences, these choices may not result from different processes: the outcomes should be distinguished from the causes. In seeking to explain the policy process, as opposed to policy choices and outcomes, this paper emphasises the need to look at institutional factors - in particular, the institutional design of contemporary Spanish democracy and Spain's economic model as the core explanatory variables. Only in this way can an account be provided which accommodates both core stable characteristics of the policy process as well as short-term variations in policy choices and outcome both across time and across different sectors. Adapted from the source document.