Towards a population ecology approach of transnational advocacy? An emerging research field

The number and scope of transnational organizations has risen markedly during the past decades. According to the Union of International Associations (UIA), each year over a thousand transnational organizations are established, and as a result in 2012 the UIA estimated the existence of no less than 7,608 intergovernmental and an astonishing number of 56,834 nongovernmental organizations (see www.uia.be). Given the sheer size of political organizations active in transnational political processes, this chapter argues that the global environment provides an extremely rich setting for studying the organizational development of interest group communities. Unfortunately, interest group scholars have not yet taken full advantage of this rich laboratory, in our opinion mostly because the literature on transnational advocacy developed rather separately from existing interest group studies. We nonetheless see many parallels and overlaps between these literatures, for instance, in terms of key research questions that are asked as well as methodological issues. This chapter, therefore, reviews the transnational advocacy literature from an interest group perspective and in doing so we aim to identify the common ground between both fields as well as some relevant challenges.