It’s not just who you know: System-level variation in the availability of process information

Springer Science and Business Media LLC - Tập 6 - Trang 44-65 - 2017
Emily Matthews Luxon1
1Department of Social Sciences, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, USA

Tóm tắt

‘Informational lobbying’ is the provision of information to policymakers with the intent of influencing debate and policy. However, influence is more likely when groups make strategic choices about what (relevant and timely) information to provide, when, and to whom. To do this, groups need ‘process information,’ or knowledge about current policymaking. In contrast to extant theories of informational lobbying, I argue that we cannot assume process information is automatically available to groups, nor that access to it is solely dependent on group-level characteristics like resource endowments. Instead, each policymaking system releases process information differently. Using interviews with forestry-related groups in France and Sweden, I show that policymaking systems matter more than group type for these groups’ perceptions of process information. Acknowledging process information as a systemic variable in its own right opens up new avenues of inquiry about lobbying and group behavior.

Tài liệu tham khảo

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