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Who’s in and who’s out?: Explaining access to policymakers in Belgium

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Abstract

In most political systems, the community of policy insiders represents a small subset of the total interest group population. Therefore, one key question is which factors explain why some mobilized interests become insiders and others remain outsiders. By contrasting a bottom-up registration of interest groups with a top-down census of all groups that enjoy access to policymakers, we present a unique approach to distinguish insiders from outsiders. This approach allows us to systematically analyze which factors – such as resources, constituency, scale of organization and policy portfolio – predict who becomes a policy insider. Our analysis focuses on interest group politics in Belgium, and shows that next to resources, the size of the membership, the scale of organization and a group’s policy portfolio are strong predictors of the likelihood to gain access.

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Notes

  1. For instance, Belgium has three peak labor unions, each tied to specific political-ideological segments (in casu Catholics, socialists and liberals). In addition, also some prominent socio-cultural organizations (representing youth, women, elderly or disabled people) and NGOs can be linked to one of these pillars.

  2. NACE is the abbreviation of the French Nomenclature statistique des activités économiques dans la Communauté européenne. This European industry classification system consists of a six digit code and is systematically used in most national statistical data systems (see http://goo.gl/8NLquM). Full definition of S94: ‘This division includes activities of organizations representing interests of special groups or promoting ideas to the general public. These organizations usually have a constituency of members, but their activities may involve and benefit non-members as well. The primary breakdown of this division is determined by the purpose that these organizations serve, namely interests of employers, self-employed individuals and the scientific community (group 94.1), interests of employees (group 94.2) or promotion of religious, political, cultural, educational or recreational ideas and activities (group 94.9)’.

  3. They are assigned code 84.302, which specifically refers to mutuals or ‘ziekenfondsen en zorgkassen’.

  4. True, whether or not an organized interest has gained access to consultation arrangements is one way to assess access. Yet, there are still significant and substantial differences in the ‘insiderness’ among those who gained this form of access. For a more detailed account of this matter we refer to Maloney et al (1994), and, for the Belgian case a recent publication by Fraussen et al (2014).

  5. In addition we also tested models with an interaction term for membership density (the number of members) and membership types (individual members, institutional members, and associations). This allows us to check whether the impact of membership densities (vis-à-vis access) is conditional on the type of members. In the Supplementary online appendix (Table 2A; Models V and VI) we report evidence with the raw and transformed membership variables. These results demonstrate that there is no significant conditional effect. This implies furthermore that, although organizations with individual members have less chance to gain access (Model II), on average organizations with more members enjoy more access (Models III and IV). Or, having more members can be considered as advantageous to all organizations (regardless of the particular membership type, that is, also organizations with individual members benefit from it).

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Acknowledgements

The research presented in this article has been supported by the Odysseus program of the Research Foundation-Flanders (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen). The authors would like to thank the journal editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their constructive criticism.

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Fraussen, B., Beyers, J. Who’s in and who’s out?: Explaining access to policymakers in Belgium. Acta Polit 51, 214–236 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2015.9

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