SYMPOSIUM

studying interest groups:

methodological challenges and
tools
rainer eising
Department of Social Science, Ruhr-University Bochum, University St. 150, GC 04/146,
Bochum D-44801, Germany

doi:10.1057/eps.2016.14; published online 27 May 2016

Abstract
Research on interest groups has evolved from a focus on small-N studies to
larger-N studies in the past 15 years. While both European and American
research has become more sophisticated and aware of methodological
aspects, there is yet no specialized literature on methods regarding how to
study interest groups. Only few studies discuss the methodological implica-
tions of interest group studies, as well as the transferability of methods
employed in other areas of political science to this research area.
The contributions in this symposium focus on major problems and topics in
interest group research and elaborate methods to deal with them: (1) the
identification of the relevant interest group population, (2) the analysis of
interest group strategies such as access, (3) the identification of interest
groups positions and frames, and (4) the measurement of interest group
success and influence. The introduction outlines these research problems
and describes how the contributions to this symposium address them.
The aim of the symposium is to increase awareness of the intricacies of
these research problems, outline suitable practices to handle them, and
stimulate debate on these methodological aspects.

Keywords interest groups; research methods; methodology

esearch on interest groups has past 15 years. In a recent review

R evolved from a focus on small-N

studies to larger-N studies in the
of American interest group studies,
Hojnacki and her co-authors found that
european political science: 16 2017 291
(291 – 305) © 2016 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680- 4333/17 www.palgrave.com/journals
 the number of groups, issues, and
policy domains analyzed in each study
has on average increased over time
(see Hojnacki et al, 2012). Similar trends
can be noted in European scholars’ work
on interest groups. In a review of the
state of the art in interest group studies,
Beyers et al (2008b: 1298) suggested
that ‘a cumulation of knowledge’ in this
research area may be ‘best achieved via
discrete, but related and compatible stu-
dies of interest groups’. The research
designs of modular research projects on
EU interest group politics (INTEREURO),
the presence of interest groups in
national institutional arenas (INTERAR-
ENA), party-interest group relationships
in Western democracies (PAIRDEM) (see
www.intereuro.eu; www.interarena.dk;
http://www.sv.uio.no/isv/english/
research/projects/elin-allern-pairdem/),
a series of compatible surveys on the
Europeanization of interest groups in
various EU member states (see Dür and
Mateo, 2014; Kohler et al, 2013) and the
increasing number of studies on interest
group populations (Gray and Lowery,
1996; Halpin and Jordan, 2012; Wonka
et al, 2010) indicate that an important
strand of research has evolved along
these lines during the past years. In
their review of EU interest group studies,
Bunea and Baumgartner (2014: 15) also
find that the percentage of statistical
and inferential analyses grew substan-
tially relative to descriptive studies after
2007.
The acknowledged need for compar-
ability in interest group research has also
increased awareness of the factors limit-
ing theoretical and empirical generaliza-
tions and the efforts to deliberately
control the factors weighing in on such
generalizations. While both European
and American research has become more
sophisticated and aware of methodologi-
cal aspects, there is yet no specialized
literature on methods regarding how to
study interest groups. This is despite the
292 european political science: 16 2017 studying interest groups
‘… there is yet no
specialized literature on
methods regarding how
to study interest groups’.
fact that many interest group studies use
advanced research tools, the authors
reflect on the usage of their research
methods and are aware of their strengths,
problems, and pitfalls, and several of
them also aim at advancing the research
methods of interest group studies. Hence,
interest group studies tie in to broader
developments in social science metho-
dology and its state of the art. And while
there is certainly no need to develop
methods that are exclusively geared at
interest group studies, it seems impor-
tant to reflect on the methodological
implications of interest group analyses,
as well as the transferability of methods
employed in other areas of political
science to interest group studies. Such
transfers bring with them the danger of
importing research tools from other
fields of study without addressing the
suitability of these tools in interest group
studies (see also Bunea and Ibenskas,
2016). The contributions in a special
issue of Interest Groups & Advocacy
(see Beyers et al, 2014a) on the use of
large-N methods in EU interest group
research that cover sampling strategies,
interviewing techniques, the empirical
classification of interest groups, and dif-
ferent methods to study frames, de
Figueiredo and Richter’s (2014) report
on empirical research on lobbying in the
US context, as well as Klüver’s (2009)
analysis of the usage of quantitative con-
tent analysis techniques, and Dür’s
(2008) discussion on the measurement
of influence are exceptions to the lack of
methodological studies in interest group
research and not the rule.
In this symposium, we point out
some characteristics of interest group
research that have implications for the
methods used to study interest groups.
We are aware that the literature on
interest groups is highly segmented
(Baumgartner and Leech, 1998; Beyers
et al, 2008a; Eising, 2008) and that
researchers use a variety of methods to
study interest groups. There is neither a
united research interest nor a unified the-
oretical perspective on interest groups,
nor an established methodological canon
– and neither of them is likely to come
about because of the multifaceted nature
of interest groups. Many studies focus on
the contribution of interest groups to poli-
tical participation, political representa-
tion, democratic politics, and social
change at large, such as the social capital,
civil society, or social movement litera-
tures. But it seems fair to say that the
prevalent strands of interest group stu-
dies center on the activities and the influ-
ence of interest groups as vehicles of
political representation in political deci-
sion making. According to Hojnacki et al
(2012), about two-third of the recent
empirical studies in the United States
focused on interest groups’ strategies
and influence in public policymaking. The
extreme positions on the involvement and
say of interest groups in public policymak-
ing have been formulated by pluralist and
neo-corporatist scholars: On the one
hand, Latham (1952: 390) claimed that
the ‘legislature referees the group strug-
gle, ratifies the victories of the successful
political coalitions, and records the terms
of the surrenders, compromises, and con-
quests in the form of statutes’. On the
other hand, Lehmbruch (1979: 50, 52)
cautioned against characterizing public
policies as outcomes of ‘vector sums’ of
interest group pressures, emphasizing
instead the influence that state policies
and concertation patterns exert on the
involvement and the say of interest
groups in public policymaking. More
recent empirical studies on the involve-
ment of interest groups in legislative
‘… while there is certainly
no need to develop
methods that are
exclusively geared at
interest group studies, it
seems important to
reflect on the
methodological
implications of interest
group analyses, as well
as the transferability of
methods employed in
other areas of political
science to interest group
studies’.
‘… the contributions in
this symposium focus on
recurrent problems and
topics in interest group
research, and discuss
and propose methods to
deal with them’.
politics tend to arrive at nuanced and
varied findings of interest group strate-
gies and influence (e.g. Dür et al, 2015).
To contribute to further knowledge
formation on the role of interest groups
in legislative politics, the contributions
in this symposium focus on recurrent
problems and topics in interest group
research, and discuss and propose
methods to deal with them. They
address major research problems in
interest group research: (1) the identifi-
cation of the relevant interest group
population; (2) the analysis of access
patterns and venue shopping in legisla-
tive politics; (3) the identification of the
interest groups’ positions, arguments,
and frames; and (4) the measurement
rainer eising european political science: 16 2017 293
 of interest group success and influence.
After delineating the importance of con-
textual factors and sampling in interest
group research, the following sections of
this introductory article will outline these
research problems and describe how the
contributions to this symposium address
them. All articles discuss the adequacy of
methods commonly employed to deal
with these research problems and suggest
amendments, procedures, and practices
to make them more suitable for the task
at hand. While Varone et al (2016)
develop a pure research design for the
usage of social network analysis in public
policy analysis, the other contributions
provide also empirical illustrations for
their methodological arguments. The aim
of the symposium is to increase aware-
ness of the intricacies of such research
problems and to work toward the devel-
opment of suitable practices to handle
them. The contributions grew out of a
Workshop on methods to study interest
groups at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Sal-
amanca in April 2014.
THE STUDY OF INTEREST
GROUPS IN LEGISLATIVE
LOBBYING
In the past decade, comparative political
science has increasingly recognized the
relevance of context factors for interest
group mediation and public policymaking.
Pre-eminent scholars argue not only that
‘context matters’, and that causal infer-
ences depend on contexts, but that atten-
tion to context ‘promotes systematic
knowledge’ (Tilly and Goodin, 2006).
In interest group studies, Hojnacki et al
(2012) put it as follows: ‘Efforts to sys-
tematically observe groups in the envir-
onments in which they develop, make
decisions, and take action, and in a way
that recognizes the variation in those
environments, could advance not only
our understanding of groups but also our
294 european political science: 16 2017 studying interest groups
‘They address major
research problems in
interest group research:
(1) the identification of
the relevant interest
group population; (2) the
analysis of access
patterns and venue
shopping in legislative
politics; (3) the
identification of the
interest groups’
positions, arguments,
and frames; and (4) the
measurement of interest
group success and
influence’.
understanding of politics and policy mak-
ing more generally’. For these reasons, a
recent special issue of the Journal of Eur-
opean Public Policy (see Klüver et al,
2015) has focused on the relevance of
contextual factors in interest group stu-
dies. Even though they do not emphasize
this aspect, the contributions also pay
attention to the effects of contextual fac-
tors. In contrast to many previous interest
groups studies, (see Baumgartner and
Leech, 1998: 174) they not only pay
attention to organizational features (nota-
bly the types and resources of interest
organizations as well as their membership
types), but also to institutional and venue
contexts (such as the Danish and EU pol-
icy-making systems), issue contexts
(such as the issue salience, the (re)dis-
tributive or regulatory nature of issues,
issue scope, etc.), and coalition contexts
(coalition membership of an actor, the size
of coalitions, the presence of opposing
coalitions, etc.) in legislative politics. In
the latter respect, it is in order to note that
it can be difficult to identify coalitions
among interest groups because many of
these coalitions are informal, temporary
and undisclosed. This constitutes a
research problem as few interest groups
work always alone and as the com-
bined resources of a coalition or what
Baumgartner et al (2009: 202) called a
‘policy side’ can matter more to policy
outcomes than those of individual groups.
The sampling frames of the contribu-
tions take the contextual factors to vary-
ing degrees into account. As is the case in
many interest group studies, the articles
tend to parameterize the macro-institu-
tional context; there is no comparison
across international, national, or sub-
national institutional contexts, only along
venues within the chosen context. Each
contribution is placed within a specific
institutional setting at the subnational
(California), national (Denmark), or
supranational (EU) level and highlights
the presence of interest groups in differ-
ent venues (parliament, government,
administration, media, courts, commit-
tees, consultations, etc.) within these
contexts. Binderkrantz and Pedersen
(2016) sample interest groups based on
their presence in three different arenas in
the Danish political system. The other
contributions sample the organizations
based on the issue(s) they study. Three
contributions are case studies that focus
on different EU policies: car emissions
policy, the regulation of tobacco control,
and foreign policy on the Israel–Palestine
conflict, respectively. While their case
study design does not allow for compar-
isons across cases, all three studies draw
on within-case variations to work out cau-
sal mechanisms and effects in their ana-
lyses: Both Vannoni’s (2016) analysis of
tobacco control and Voltolini’s (2016) of
foreign policy trace issue developments
over longer periods of time. These authors
identify also several issues that were
important within these cases as do Bunea
and Ibenskas (2016) in their analysis of
EU car emissions policy. While these con-
tributions identify the issues they com-
pare only after case selection, Varone et
al’s (2016) contribution on the usage of
network analysis builds on new develop-
ments in issue- or policy-based sampling
to select the cases they study (see
Baumgartner et al, 2009; Mahoney,
2008; Beyers et al, 2014b). Given the
amount of work it takes to identify the
relevant interest group population in leg-
islative studies, the relations among the
involved actors as well as the positions
they held on the discussed issues (see
below), the authors propose to select a
limited number of most different policy
issues for a detailed comparative study of
the policy processes on these issues using
social network analysis. The focus on
‘most different’ issues is meant to ensure
variations across issues that allow for
robust analytical insights. Let us now
move on to the research problems the
authors address explicitly.
IDENTIFYING THE ACTORS
The identification of the relevant actors is
often a problem plaguing interest group
research on legislative lobbying. A sty-
lized comparison with the literature on
political parties is instructive: It is fairly
easy for party political scholars to identify
the relevant population of organizations
by pointing to a minimum number of votes
or seats the parties obtained in demo-
cratic elections and/or by referring to their
blackmailing potential in the party com-
petition as Sartori (1976) has previously
suggested. Interest groups, unlike politi-
cal parties, do not seek public office for
the promotion of public policies. They are
not revealed through elections, represen-
tation in legislative assemblies, or gov-
ernment offices. Accordingly, for interest
group scholars, it is arguably more diffi-
cult to identify the relevant actors.
First, it is not always clear who are the
relevant actors in legislative politics.
rainer eising european political science: 16 2017 295
 Beyers et al (2008a) argue that three
factors are crucial to the definition of
interest groups: organization, political
interests, and informality. Organization
excludes social movements (but not social
movement organizations) and wide-
spread public attitudes from the relevant
units of observation. Interest group poli-
tics is about organized forms of political
behavior. ‘Political interests’ relates to the
attempts of organizations to impact on
the authoritative allocation of values on
behalf of their members, constituencies,
or general political ideas. Informality
means that interest groups do not usually
seek public office even though their inter-
actions with politicians and bureaucrats
are not only of an informal nature but
may be heavily institutionalized and for-
malized. In legislative politics, many pol-
icy advocates are not interest groups in
the sense of being collective actors that
seek to promote the interests of their
members or constituency vis-à-vis state
institutions and other policy advocates
(Jordan et al, 2004). They are interest
organizations that have rather different
organizational goals and are structured
as hierarchies: firms maximize profits,
institutions such as hospitals provide pub-
lic services, research institutes produce
evidence and arguments, and so on. Many
of them are not so much accountable to
members but to shareholders or spon-
sors, or to government departments and
ultimately voters in chains of delegation.
To these actors, interest representation is
a spin-off of their core organizational mis-
sions (Salisbury, 1984). Given the broad
variety of actors involved in public policy
debates, comparisons across different
categories of actors are as difficult as far-
reaching generalizations about the rele-
vance of specific organizational character-
istics such as financial resources, staff, or
members. Therefore, it is more likely that
interest group studies will produce con-
tingent generalizations rather than law-
like statements.
296 european political science: 16 2017 studying interest groups
Second, some interest groups are
highly visible and engage frequently in
interest representation across a broad
variety of topics such as EUROBUSINESS,
the European producers’, and employers’
federation. But it is cumbersome to iden-
tify the less-visible actors, and almost
impossible to retrieve all relevant actors
out there trying to – maybe unsuccess-
fully – take part in the political process.
Notably, it is difficult to obtain information
on informal contacts between decision
makers and interest organizations. For
example, Members of Parliament are not
normally inclined to grant insight into
their personal calendars that would
enable researchers to study the politi-
cians’ contacts with interest groups
(see Binderkrantz and Pedersen, 2016).
Baumgartner et al (2009) suggest that it
is probably easier to identify the activities
of challengers to the status quo than
those of its defenders because the former
(need to) act more overtly. This implies
that interest group research faces greater
challenges to capture the second and third
dimension of power (i.e. agenda setting
control, cultural, institutional and idea-
tional biases, etc.) than the first dimen-
sion, namely the prevalence of actors in
public policy decision making (on these
power dimensions, see Lukes, 1974).
One implication is a focus of interest
group studies on the more readily identifi-
able presence of actors in government or
parliament committees, their participa-
tion in and submissions to official consul-
tations, as well as their registration in
door-pass registers (Binderkrantz and
Pedersen, 2016; Berkhout and Lowery,
2008). However, the information in these
sources can be incomplete or misleading.
Relying on just one data source will almost
inevitably lead to a distorted picture of
interest group involvement in public pol-
icymaking. To give an example, studies
that rely only on the European Commis-
sion’s public consultations on a policy pro-
posal as a data source lose track of
interest groups approaching the European
Parliament or the national governments
on the same issue or that approach the
European Commission officials by email or
phone calls. As a second example, the
door-pass register of the German Bundes-
tag is supposed to include all interest
groups that represent their interests on
incoming bills vis-à-vis the German par-
liament and government. But only 12.7
per cent (N = 280) of the 2,200 interest
groups that were registered with the Ger-
man parliament in the years 2011 and
2012 were present in its public committee
hearings in 2011 even though the com-
mittee proceedings and hearings are cru-
cial to the legislative passage of the bills.
Looking at these data the other way
round, only 61 per cent (N = 280) of the
462 interest groups that were invited to
the parliamentary committee debates in
2011 were listed in the parliament’s lobby
list (Eising and Spohr, 2015). Therefore,
studies on legislative lobbying that rely
solely on the German parliament’s regis-
try data lead to a highly exaggerated
estimate of the number of interest groups
that are active in parliament and miss at
the same time a substantial portion of the
relevant interest group population in any
given year. In short, reliance on just one
data source is almost synonymous with an
incomplete actor population and biased
inferences.
It follows that interest group scholars
need to draw on a number of data retrieval
techniques and on sources beyond the
governments’ and parliaments’ official
records to establish the relevant actor
populations in public policymaking, such
as web-mining, (snow-balling) inter-
views, media analyses, and survey-based
research techniques. And even when rely-
ing on several data sources, researchers
are usually forced to make inferences
based on incomplete samples of unknown
populations. Furthermore, in many coun-
tries, parliament or government data on
consultations of interest groups are not
available for longer periods of time and
not comparable across policy domains,
government departments, and parlia-
mentary committees. Accordingly, stu-
dies that do take time into account tend
to include only a few points in time rather
than actual time series.
Several contributions in this symposium
seek to establish the active population of
interest groups in a political system or in
different policy domains. Notably, the arti-
cles discuss research methods to estab-
lish the population of policy advocates in
public policy-making processes (Varone
et al, 2016) and of interest groups that
are politically active in major national
arenas (Binderkrantz and Pedersen,
2016). Thus, in their research design pro-
posal for social network analyses that
draws on a study of publicy policymaking
in California, Varone et al (2016) suggest
to take into account all relevant institu-
tional venues and make a systematic
inventory of all interest groups that
sought to influence the binding policy
decisions that were made on a studied
policy issue in these venues: the legisla-
ture, the executive, the judiciary, regula-
tory agencies, and the institutions of
direct democracy. In their words, ‘taking
into account a whole policy-making pro-
cess and focusing on all activated venues
is crucial to explain the advocacy activities
and the policy success of [interest groups,
RE] in general …’ (Varone et al, 2016).
After having discussed the trouble of iden-
tifying the relevant actors, the next sec-
tion investigates the research problems
involved in analyzing the strategies and
activities of interest groups.
ANALYZING INTEREST GROUP
STRATEGIES
When studying interest group strategies,
a common distinction is made among
inside and outside strategies (Gais and
Walker, 1991). The former center on letter
writing, the submission of position
rainer eising european political science: 16 2017 297
 papers, telephone, or face-to-face con-
tacts of interest groups with bureaucrats
and politicians while the latter focus
on their media campaigns and protests,
the organization of conferences and
the staging of other events to sway
policymakers. Inside strategies are also
referred to as access strategies and out-
side strategies as messaging or voice
strategies (Hojnacki et al, 2012; Beyers,
2004; Binderkrantz, 2005), even though
the connotation of these terms does not
match perfectly: Some studies conceive
of litigation as an inside strategy (Gais and
Walker, 1991: 110) while others regard it
as an alternative to inside strategies
(Bouwen and McCown, 2007). Similarly,
media presence is usually regarded as an
outside strategy but tends also to be stu-
died under the access label by some scho-
lars (Binderkrantz and Pedersen, 2016).
Furthermore, the nature of the relation-
ship among inside and outside strategies
is debated: Some studies suggest that
outside strategies may work to the detri-
ment of access strategies, while more
recent research indicates that these strat-
egies may well be used complimentary
(Chalmers, 2011). Baumgartner and
Leech (1998) also contend that a larger
repertoire of lobbying tactics may be more
important than perfecting any single
strategy. Moreover, Gais and Walker
(1991: 103) argued that interest groups
do not adopt or change strategies ‘at will,
but rather, depend on previous decisions
and the particular institutional and politi-
cal environments they face’.
Two articles in this symposium discuss
methods to study interest group strate-
gies. One of them scrutinizes a major
element of inside strategies, namely the
interest groups’ access to different politi-
cal venues. Binderkrantz and Pedersen
(2016) study the access of different types
of interest organizations to the Danish
administration, parliament, and media,
pointing out that access to these venues
is not a unilateral decision made by
298 european political science: 16 2017 studying interest groups
interest groups, but is also dependent to
a large extent on the gate keeper’s will-
ingness to grant access to that venue or
arena. Building on previous studies that
emphasize the importance of political
exchange in access relations, they
emphasize that access is ‘something key
political actors control and can exchange
for the resources groups supply’. More-
over, they shed light on how to conceive
of access and measure it as well as on the
usefulness of different data sources when
studying it. Their findings demonstrate
not only that the access of different types
of groups to the administration, the par-
liament, and the media varies significantly
but also that the extent of bias in each
arena differs profoundly: The authors find
that the greatest bias exists in the admin-
istration, and that less bias is present in
media and parliament. Business groups
have relatively more access to the admin-
istration than to the parliament and the
media, whereas trade unions are slightly
more visible in the media than in the
administration or in the parliament. Public
interest groups have slightly more access
to the parliament than to the media, and
clearly more access to the legislature than
to the administration. However, it remains
elusive if these patterns are mostly the
outcome of interest group strategies or of
the decisions taken by the gate keepers in
each arena. While their conceptual enrich-
ment certainly advances our thinking
about access concept, the authors’ opera-
tional definition entails measurement pro-
blems when it comes to disentangling its
two key components: interest group
strategy and gate keeping. Their concep-
tualization also crisscrosses the common
distinction between access and outside
strategies by conceiving of media cover-
age as a result of access to the media.
While several studies on legislative lob-
bying cover the access strategies of inter-
est groups, it is less common to look
systematically into the patterns of coali-
tion formation and network formation.
Varone et al (2016) look into the usage of
different venues by interest groups, draw-
ing on a study of multi-venue players in
Californian policymaking. Their study
analyzes the lobbying efforts of policy
advocates on a sample of selected issues
in the legislative venue, the direct democ-
racy venue, the government and adminis-
trative venue, and the judicial venue in
California. In their analysis, the authors
shed light on the usefulness of social net-
work analysis when assessing the impor-
tance of the activity level and the position
of each interest group across all coalitions
and venues. On the basis of their reading
of previous network analyses, they find
that the quality of a network position (i.e.
the centrality of an actor in a network) is
more important than the quantity of ties.
They also find that retrieving actors based
on their actual activities and public
records is an important correction to
research findings that are based on infor-
mation gathered from interest groups
through interviews or questionnaires.
The latter tend to inflate the amount of
activity in the studied venues. Thus, it
may well be that interest groups tend to
overstate the extent of their policy-cen-
tered activities to increase the organiza-
tional adherence and support of their
members. In sum, both contributions
shed much light on how major strategies
of interest groups may be studied.
ANALYZING INTEREST GROUP
POSITIONS AND FRAMES
Identifying the positions, arguments, and
frames of actors requires analyzing the
statements actors make and exchange
with each other in the policy process.
Unlike the members of parliamentary par-
ties, interest groups do not cast formal
votes on policy proposals. They formulate
carefully worded statements about the
policy problem at hand, present evidence
and arguments (Majone, 1989) on the
proposed remedies and their likely
effects, taking into account relations with
their members as well as with the political
institutions that tabled the proposal and
those that will decide on it. As a result, it is
sometimes not easy to gauge if groups are
in favor of a policy proposal, against it, or
indifferent, ambiguous or neutral about it.
Fundamental opposition may be hidden
behind a technicality.
In the past, most interest group studies
relied on the manual analysis of interest
group statements and their comparison
with policy proposals and legislative texts
without systematic codebooks. Both the
argumentative turn in policy analysis
(Majone, 1989) and, methodological and
technical advances have promoted the
usage of content and discourse analysis
in interest group studies to study the wide
array of textual data that is available on
public policymaking (e.g., see Laver et al,
2003). In the past years, the systematic
study of interest groups’ positions and
frames has made great strides. Both
(computer-assisted) qualitative (Eising et
al, 2015) and quantitative content ana-
lyses (see Klüver, 2009; Klüver et al,
2015) have been applied to study the
arguments, positions, and frames of inter-
est groups (see also Bunea and Ibenskas,
2016; Voltolini, 2016). Building on the
‘words as data’ approach that has
achieved a great prominence in the study
of party manifestos and treats words as
independent observations (see Boräng et
al, 2014) and drawing on software such as
Wordfish and T-Lab, an increasing number
of studies employ quantitative content
analyses that use machine-based coding
and enable researchers to compare a
large number of position papers and trace
their underlying dimensions. They allow
for the location of arguments and actors in
one and two-dimensional spaces or in
distinct groups through statistical dimen-
sion reduction in the form of (multiple)
correspondence analysis, multidimen-
sional scaling, or cluster analysis. In
contrast, manual or computer-assisted
rainer eising european political science: 16 2017 299
 content analyses would not leave the cod-
ing to automated procedures, but to
trained human coders and proceed on the
basis of systematic codebooks, to study
not only the manifest words, but also
more complex statements, using a variety
of inductive and deductive techniques to
construct the codes (for a comprehensive
overview, see Krippendorff, 2013: Chap-
ters 7–9). Reduction of the number of
codes can build on Lazarsfeld’s functional
reduction (for deductive codes that have
no entry), pragmatic reduction (for bor-
dering codes), and arbitrary numerical
reduction (for aggregated codes), for both
deductively and inductively derived
codes. The usage of statistical dimension
reduction to reduce the number of codes
or to group actors and arguments into
categories is less common in computer-
assisted content analysis because of its
qualitative outlook, but can also be
applied after transforming the coded text
segments into numerical data.
Four contributions in this symposium
rely on the coding of policy documents to
measure the preferences, positions, or
frames of policy advocates. Two of them
explicitly discuss methods to identify the
positions of actors and the frames they
promote in EU policy debates. Bunea and
Ibenskas (2016) compare the advantages
and drawbacks of quantitative and quali-
tative content analysis techniques. They
juxtapose the findings that were obtained
in a quantitative content analysis of inter-
est group positions on EU car emissions
policy based on the program Wordfish to
those of a manual content analysis. In
general, the authors caution against the
unquestioned import of research tools
developed in other research areas to
interest group studies. Contending that
automated methods ‘are not a substitute
for careful thought and close reading and
require extensive and problem-specific
validation’ (Grimmer and Stewart, 2013:
267), the authors suggest that interest
groups’ position papers have several
300 european political science: 16 2017 studying interest groups
traits that may make them unintelligible
to a quantitative text analysis. Notably,
they point to the heterogeneity of the
policy advocates that authored the posi-
tion papers, the varying text formats and
languages of the papers, the technical
nature of these texts, the different lengths
of the potential coding units (words, sen-
tences, paragraphs, etc.), and the varying
purposes of the texts. Furthermore, they
find that the potentially high dimensional-
ity of EU policy debates may militate as
much against subsuming the position
papers’ contents under a single policy
dimension as their non-ideological, tech-
nical character through which numbers
and figures may convey more important
information to policymakers than word
frequencies. In fact, they juxtapose the
requirement of having a single policy
dimension that is usually practiced in
Wordfish analyses (and should be defined
ex ante) to their identification of two pol-
icy dimensions through a manual content
analysis, one of them pointing to the reg-
ulatory regime and the other to marketing
and consumer-oriented measures. How-
ever, their general conclusion that ‘the
most productive line of inquiry is to iden-
tify the best way to use both humans and
automated methods for analyzing texts’
(Grimmer and Stewart, 2013: 270) would
almost certainly be accepted by all scho-
lars who do not insist on the idiosyncratic
manual coding of policy documents.
Voltolini’s (2016) contribution presents
an alternative to study positions and
frames in EU policy debates based on
quantitative or computer-assisted con-
tent analysis techniques. Elucidating the
change and development of positions and
frames over time through political dis-
course, s/he proposes process tracing to
identify the manifestation, transforma-
tion, and impact of frames in EU policy-
making. The author retrieves these
frames through inductive manual content
analysis. She suggests that case studies
and process tracing are suitable means to
‘capture the dynamics of the actual
framing process’ (Kaplan, 2008: 746),
because of their in-depth focus, their
study of developments over time, and
their ability to capture that frames are not
simply copypasted from one actor to the
next but objects of debate and re-inter-
pretation ‘by the parties involved through
social interactions’ (Voltolini, 2016). She
points out that process tracing and case
studies on the emergence and evolution
of frames are particularly suitable in
underexplored policy areas in which public
documentation and standardized data are
not available or rare – as is the case in the
area of bilateral foreign trade relations
between the European Union and Israel,
which is the object of this study. In sum,
both contributions emphasize, in different
ways, the context sensitivity of research
methods and emphasize the suitability of
manual coding procedures when studying
one case or a few cases. While the authors
of both studies provide good reasons for
doing so, their proceeding raises of course
the question of how many cases and
research questions are truly intractable
to research methods that emphasize effi-
ciency, replicability, and external validity
to a greater extent.
MEASURING INTEREST GROUP
SUCCESS AND INFLUENCE
Finally, interest group studies seek to
account for policy outcomes and gauge
the success and influence of interest
groups. The importance of measuring
influence for interest group studies cannot
be overestimated. Measuring influence
tackles the question of who wields power
in a policy-making system and if this sys-
tem has a bias in favor of certain actors
and interests over others: Public institu-
tions or private actors, business interests,
or social movements? Therefore, March
(1955: 432) compared the explanatory
leverage of influence in the study of public
policymaking with that of force in the
study of motion. Nonetheless, influence
is not frequently studied and its valid and
reliable measurement is even less often
accomplished. Besides pointing to the
strategic options that interest groups use
when seeking to impact on policy out-
comes and the contextual factors shaping
their activities and success, Dür (2008)
has highlighted three methods to study
interest group influence. First, he is criti-
cal of case study approaches such as
process tracing because of the lack of
variation on the experimental variables,
the lack of a yardstick indicating the
extent of influence that actors may have
had, and the problems to generalize on
the basis of the case study findings
and to extend the analysis to a larger
number of cases. Second, measurements
of reported or attributed influence must
also be treated with caution because
interest groups have both incentives to
overestimate their influence (with a view
to their members) and to underestimate
it (to prevent countermobilization).
And experts attributing influence to actors
may not be fully or properly informed.
Third, he discusses spatial modeling as
an option to gauge interest group influ-
ence. Here, the distance between the
interest group’s position on an issue and
the policy outcome as well as the distance
between the group’s position and the
reversion point (the hypothetical outcome
if no policy change came about) are cru-
cial for gauging the influence of groups.
While applicable to a large number of
cases and able to accommodate the struc-
tural power of actors, the causal mechan-
ism of attaining influence tends to remain
underspecified in these models: Is a
greater proximity to the outcome because
of luck or to policymakers responding to
interest group arguments and evidence?1
In short, measuring influence and success
it not an easy task. Each method has
drawbacks and advantages.
Three contributions in this symposium
issue present ways of studying interest
rainer eising european political science: 16 2017 301
 groups’ advocacy success and their
impact on outcomes. Through careful pro-
cess tracing, Voltolini (2016) gauges the
effect of interest group framing. She
establishes that the European Commis-
sion has over time changed its predomi-
nant frame on trade relations with Israel
and gradually adopted a legalistic frame
that was continuously promoted by a
NGO. The author highlights the causal
mechanism leading to this outcome – the
persistent and frequent presentation of a
specific legal frame on EU–Israeli trade
relations that pointed to the inconsistence
of these relations with the EU’s legal fra-
mework and its international commit-
ments. Carefully delimiting the scope
conditions of her generalizations on this
instance of a strong and slow boring of
hardboards, her analysis exemplifies
the potential contribution of case studies
to cumulative knowledge formation in
research on interest group influence.
Vannoni (2016) scrutinizes the useful-
ness of spatial modeling for the study of
interest group influence in a case study of
EU tobacco control. First of all, the author
engages in the conceptual clarification of
influence as the causal link between the
interest group’s actions and the policy
outcomes on the one hand, and prefer-
ence attainment or success as the extent
to which the outcome matches the inter-
est group’s preferences on the other. Sec-
ond, the author proposes an innovative
conceptualization of spatial models that
aim at measuring influence on public deci-
sions. His measure takes not only the
likely reversion point (the point that holds
if no agreement on the proposed policy
change comes about) but also the status
quo at the time when the policy proposal
was made into account. This is based on
the claim that the difference between the
status quo ante and the location of the
policy proposal lies outside the scope of
preference attainment. Third, the author
suggests loosening the assumption of uni-
dimensionality that underlies many
302 european political science: 16 2017 studying interest groups
spatial models and opts instead for a two-
dimensional model (see also Bunea and
Ibenskas, 2016). To that end, he subjects
five variables that were obtained through
the manual coding of policy proposals and
position papers to multidimensional scal-
ing. The contention here is that adding the
second dimension to the first considerably
increases the exhaustiveness of the poli-
tical space in this case, the author claims.
While employing these methodological
advancements only in a case study, the
author highlights ways to extend it to a
larger number of cases, notably when
relying on other ways of coding the policy
papers.
Varone et al’s (2016) research design
for the conduct of network analyses seeks
to establish the success of interest group
lobbying. Rather than drawing on process
tracing or spatial modeling, the authors
propose a set of binary measures to
establish interest group success in differ-
ent institutional venues: The proposed
measures can be employed across differ-
ent venues and issues and indicate:
(a) whether a bill supported by an interest
group became a law or not; (b) whether
justices favored the position of an interest
group or not; (c) whether a ballot proposi-
tion supported by an interest group was
supported by voters; and (d) whether the
governmental or administrative actors
were receptive to the interest group’s
position or not. With respect to their main
research question, the authors find that
interest groups operating in several
venues are more successful in obtaining
their preferred policy outcomes than
groups operating in just one venue.
In sum, the contributions identify var-
ious ways by which interest group influ-
ence and success might be measured:
through process tracing in case studies
that delineate the scope conditions of their
findings; through general dichotomous or
ordinal scales measuring preference
attainment that can be used across differ-
ent venues and issues in large-N analyses;
and through the comparative statics of
spatial modeling to identify the extent of
the actors’ preference attainment.
THE CONTINUATION OF
METHODOLOGICAL DIALOG
Together, the contributions in this sympo-
sium exemplify the usage and develop-
ment of methods that aim to address
recurrent problems and topics in any
research on interest groups and legisla-
tive lobbying. These are namely establish-
ing the relevant population of actors,
identifying strategic choices, analyzing
positions, arguments, and frames, as well
as estimating interest group success and
influence. The contributions do not only
illustrate the thematic and methodologi-
cal pluralism of the field, they are also
meant to contribute to a dialog that can
advance the methodological tools in inter-
est group research, promote compatible
research, and increase our cumulative
knowledge about interest group politics.
To inspire such a dialog we have supple-
mented each original contribution with a
short comment by an esteemed scholar,
who specialized and worked extensively
on the topic discussed in the main study.
We hope this format will contribute to a
continued and fruitful dialog on the meth-
odological challenges in the study of inter-
est groups.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Helene
Helboe Pedersen and the contributors
to this special issue for their helpful
‘The contributions do not
only illustrate the
thematic and
methodological pluralism
of the field, they are also
meant to contribute to a
dialog that can advance
the methodological tools
in in interest group
research, promote
compatible research, and
increase our cumulative
knowledge about interest
group politics’.
comments on earlier versions of this arti-
cle. Helene and the author are grateful to
those colleagues who have taken on the
task of peer reviewing the articles in this
symposium. They would also like to
express their gratitude to the authors
and commentators who delivered their
insightful draft articles impeccably. They
are also thankful to the participants of
the workshop on methodological aspects
of interest group research at the ECPR
Joint Sessions of Workshops in Sala-
manca in April 2014, which was the start-
ing point for this symposium issue. Last
not least, they would like to thank the
European Political Science editorial team
for their continued support. Research for
this article has been funded by the Ger-
man Science Foundation (grant EI 461/
6-1) and the European Science Founda-
tion (grant 10-ECRP-008).

Note

1 On the relation between power and luck, see Barry (1980a, b) and Dowding (1996).

rainer eising european political science: 16 2017 303

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About the Author

Rainer Eising is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Ruhr-University Bochum. He has
published widely on interest mediation, governance, and public policymaking in the European
Union. He was a national team leader in the INTEREURO project (www.intereuro.eu) and has
recently directed a MERCUR funded project on interest representation in Germany (http://
www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/arenen/index.html.de).

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