Executive Summary
In order to engage in public policy, interest groups need to survive and thrive as organizations. What factors shape perceptions of group entrepreneurs as to the future prospects for their groups’ survival? The careful and ambitious work of Gray and Lowery (and others working in the population ecology paradigm) has drawn attention to that fact that not all groups that are born survive. This observation raises the question: what leads groups to ‘feel’ anxiety about their organizational mortality? In their 1997 article, utilizing survey data on the organizational characteristics and situational dynamics of a sample of groups lobbying in several US states, Gray and Lowery asked just that question: what are the levels of ‘mortality anxiety’ among groups still alive? In this article, we revisit this question using similar data, but with some additional variables, and for a non-US case (namely, post-devolution Scottish public policy). In sorting out what factors are associated with anxiety, our analysis seeks to weigh up the existing ecological emphasis on broad shifts in population-level forces (that is, competition) with group-level variables reflecting adaptive changes (that is, identity, uniqueness, changes).
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Notes
One reviewer reminded us that, in fact, some groups may well not seek to survive: they emerge to fight specific battles or campaigns, accepting success would see the group fold.
We do not investigate the link between mortality anxiety and actual mortality (but see Gray and Lowery, 1997).
These are particularly salient given that Gray and Lowery's work draws explicitly on the ecological thread in organizational studies that has increasingly focused on identity and antecedents in explaining population-level dynamics.
Note that due to our single country research design we cannot measure a variable like population density – Gray and Lowery could do this because they sampled across US states.
Legitimacy is the key mechanism that is said to govern formation, while competition governs subsequent survival prospects as populations grow in number (see Delacroix and Rao (1994) for a sympathetic critique of these as mechanisms of regulation in organizational populations).
We collected data from the 1982–2007 period, but given we survey groups active since 1999, we calculate measures of policy activity from a sub-set of this data. Devolution refers to the period after 1999 in Scotland whereby it was granted its own Parliament with powers to legislate on a limited number of so-called ‘devolved’ issues. The process in the United Kingdom, including powers granted to legislatures in Wales and Northern Ireland is referred to as devolution. Before 1999, the UK Parliament passed legislation relating to Scotland, but there was a Scotland Office that functioned as a Scottish civil service.
Given that Scotland does not have responsibility for all policy matters (so-called reserved matters), our data does not cover policy issues in areas like defense, national security, international trade or foreign affairs.
This data set was compiled largely using paper-based records held in the Scottish Government Library and its document storage facility in Edinburgh, but with the addition of some more recent documentation only available electronically on the Publications pages of the Scottish Government website.
The Scottish Government's internal Consultation Good Practice Guidance (2008) recommends that departments, on completing a consultation exercise, should deposit copies of responses with the Scottish Government Library and also post them on the Scottish Government website. However, this guidance has not always been followed, and therefore not all consultation documentation has made its way into the public domain.
Note that ‘don’t know’ responses are treated as missing in the analysis to follow. This explains the drop in the number of observations in the models presented in this article.
The original coding scheme was developed by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (see the Policy Agendas coding scheme codebook at www.policyagendas.org). However, we have used the modified UK Policy Agendas codebook at www.policyagendas.org.uk.
In their landmark study of lobbying populations, Gray and Lowery (2000, pp. 97–101) use HHI scores to examine the diversity of the lobbying populations of US states. Following Halpin and Thomas (2012), we also measured this variable according to entropy scores. However, we achieved the same finding, regardless of measure.
Note that we add one to all observations of Paid Staff before taking the natural log to avoid dropping observations with zero paid staff.
Note that a Brant Test indicates that the parallel regression assumption has not been violated, a Link Test indicates that specification error is not present, and that diagnostics of collinearity do not reveal any additional specification problems with the full model. (See full discussion of the diagnostic tests we utilized at www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/dae/ologit.htm.)
Note that in the model estimation the Trade Association group-type is omitted, it is used as the baseline category.
This was regardless of how we calculated the identity index.
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Halpin, D., Thomas, H. Interest group survival: Explaining sources of mortality anxiety. Int Groups Adv 1, 215–238 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2012.11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2012.11