No Representation Without Compensation: The Effect of Interest Groups on Legislators' Policy Area Focus.

ABSTRACT: Interest groups seek to influence parliamentarians' actions by establishing exchange relationships. We scrutinize the role of exchange by investigating how interest groups impact parliamentarians' use of individual parliamentary instruments such as questions, motions, and bills. We utilize a new longitudinal dataset (2000-2015) with 524 Swiss parliamentarians, their 6342 formal ties to interest groups (i.e., board seats), and a variety of 23,750 parliamentary instruments across 15 policy areas. This enables us to show that interest groups systematically relate to parliamentarians' use of parliamentary instruments in the respective policy areas in which they operate-even when parliamentarians' time-invariant (fixed effects) and time-variant personal affinities (occupation, committee members

SUBMITTER: Huwyler O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10415157 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature