Project

Interest Groups; Legislative studies; Parliamentarians; Political careers; Political communication; Moonlighting

Lead
In der westlichen Welt arbeiten Parlamentsabgeordneten oftmals mit Interessengruppen zusammen, sei dies im Rahmen von Nebentätigkeiten oder mittels loserer Formen des Kontaktes. Dies birgt Chancen, aber auch Risiken für das Funktionieren repräsentativer Demokratien.
Lay summary
Inhalt und Ziele: Diese Beziehung zwischen ParlamentarierInnen und Interessengruppen bietet verschiedene Ansatzpunkte zur Untersuchung. In einem ersten Schritt soll das Zustandekommen dieser Zusammenarbeit in Führungsgremien erklärt werden. Sowohl aus Sicht der Abgeordneten als auch der Interessengruppen wird untersucht, welche Motive, Anreize und Hindernisse sich bei solchen langfristigen Verbindungen als relevant erweisen. In einer zweiten Etappe wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie sich solche Beziehungen auf das Verhalten der Abgeordneten im Parlament auswirken. Die beiden Themenschwerpunkte sollen aus einer länderübergreifenden Perspektive untersucht werden. Zu diesem Zweck werden die Interessenbindungen von Abgeordneten erhoben. Diese Daten können nicht nur mit Verhaltensdaten verknüpft werden, sondern ermöglichen in Verbindung mit vorhandenen Daten des Projektes Parlamentarische Karrieren im Vergleich (http://p3.snf.ch/project-162427) auch ländervergleichende Studien. Wissenschaftlicher und gesellschaftlicher Kontext: Die Ergebnisse des Projektes tragen wichtige Erkenntnisse zum wissenschaftlichen Diskurs über Interessengruppen, ParlamentarierInnen und im weiteren Sinne Gesetzgebungsprozessen bei. Damit bieten sie auch die Grundlage für öffentliche Debatten wie etwa zu Transparenz im Lobbying, der Unabhängigkeit von Abgeordneten oder der Professionalisierung von Parlamenten.

Direct link to Lay Summary

Last update: 10.10.2020

Replication Data for Political or Financial Benefits? Ideology, Tenure, and Parliamentarians’ Choice of Interest Group Tie

Author	Huwyler, Oliver; Turner-Zwinkels, Tomas
Publication date	11.03.2020
Persistent Identifier (PID)	10.1111/spsr.12391
Repository	Swiss Political Science Review

Active participation

Communication	Title	Media	Place	Year

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The study of incumbent legislators’ collaboration with organized interests lies at the intersection of primarily moonlighting and interest group research. Moonlighting concerns parliamentarian-centric research on extra-parliamentary activities. Existing studies in the field have drawn strong attention to differences in patterns among moonlighting parliamentarians but remained relatively undertheorized. Interest group research, in contrast has been offering more systematic and theory-driven approaches to parliamentarian-interest group relations, conceptualizing them as an exchange relationship. However, this literature has remained limited to the interest group perspective.My research seeks to bridge the gap between these two fields and introduce more theory-driven analyses, particularly for parliamentarian-centric research. First, I focus on studying why and under what conditions parliamentarians seek outside employment - and what kind. Second, my research looks at the behavioral consequences of the collaboration between parliamentarians and interest groups.For my proposed year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), I have set multiple goals. My main overarching scientific and career objective is to further deepen my knowledge and skills in the area of interest group research by enjoying the mentoring support of Professor Frank Baumgartner, a leading expert in the field and by becoming part of the relevant research community at Chapel Hill. More specifically in terms of research output, my goal is, on the one hand, to work with data on earnings rather than making rough inferences from information on interest group types. On the other hand, I intend to investigate legislators’ extra-parliamentary activities in a comparative (cross-national) perspective. To achieve this goal, the already collected and coded data from Switzerland will be supplemented with data on 1.513 German parliamentarians since 2005. The choice of German parliamentarians is not only driven by the availability of high quality income data but also because it allows for the integration with existing German legislator data that is being collected by the Parliamentary Careers in Comparison (PCC) project. In the end, this allows for a quantitative analysis based on large case numbers.In scientific terms, the results of my work inform the current debates in the moonlighting and interest group literature. Moreover, my research also contributes to specific areas of research on parliaments and parliamentarians, and more broadly, legislative studies. As far as societal relevance is concerned, the results of my research are insightful to several important public debates including questions on lobbying transparency, parliamentarians’ incomes, responsiveness, and representativeness in the realm of parliaments.