Citizens are generally unaware of political decisions being made, or they often lack the knowledge and organizational means to get their voices heard at the political level (Burstein, 2014 Page and Shapiro, 1983).
Addressing this gap will be the focus of our workshop, which asks whether and under which conditions advocacy groups facilitate or cripple the connection between citizens and political decision making.Īdvocacy groups aggregate the preferences of segments of society and represent these interests in political decision making, such as agenda-setting, policy formulation or decision making processes. While advocacy groups are important channels of representation, little theoretical and empirical research has systematically addressed their function in aggregating and representing citizen’s preferences in political decision making across the globe (for recent reviews, see Burstein, 2014 Bevan and Rasmussen, 2017). They can become active on very specific or technical issues, their agendas are largely autonomous from party political cleavages and they can easily maneuver outside the purview of public scrutiny (Culpepper, 2010 Beyers et al., 2015). Where traditional channels of representation fail, advocacy groups thrive. Advocacy groups consist of movements and organizations with a political interest and which are external to the political system, ranging from NGOs, social movements and labor unions to corporate lobby groups (Baroni et al., 2014 Beyers et al., 2008). An alternative, but largely underestimated mechanism through which representation works is interest advocacy (Rasmussen et al., 2014). Yet, in an age of electoral volatility, diminishing party membership and the mediatization of politics, political parties face severe difficulties in performing this mediating role (Whiteley, 2011). Between elections, political parties are expected to mediate between citizens and elites. However, elections typically revolve around a limited set of ideologically-laden issues, are only held once in a few years, and can only retroactively punish unresponsive policymakers.
#CITIZENS VOICE FREE#
The most classic democratic control mechanisms to ensure congruence are free and fair elections (Stimson, 1991 Wlezien, 1995). One important criterion to evaluate a democracy’s performance is policy congruence, or the degree to which policy outcomes reflect the preferences of the broader public (Dahl, 1973: 1-2).
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