Interest groups and political parties in issue politics

Interest groups and political parties affect the outcomes of struggles around almost each and every political problem democratic societies may face. Their actions and interactions influence which issues receive political attention and how conflicts around these issues evolve. Democratic politics and policy making—in a large majority of cases—are politics and policymaking by interest groups and political parties. In this process, interest groups and parties play distinct roles, and their performances are characterized by certain strengths and flaws: Interest groups provide crucial information to political decisionmakers, but some societal interests are much less effectively represented through the interest group system than others. Political parties strive to control the power of government through elections and in this role make collectively binding decisions, but find it increasingly difficult to combine the responsibility that this entails with being responsive to the electorate.
With this dissertation I answer the question how and why interest groups and political parties interact in several aspects of issue politics and what this tells us about the way they attenuate or aggravate each other’s normative strengths and flaws. I analyze the behavior of large numbers of interest groups and political parties in four established Western democracies and find that interest groups and parties interact in various unexpected ways when they engage in issue politics. Doing so, they are able to balance out each other’s flaws in many aspects. Unfortunately though, in other aspects they reinforce each other’s weaknesses and this poses a serious problem for democracy.