13:10 - 14:50
P3
Room: Terrace 2B
Panel Session 3
Tanushree GoyalDoes local leadership lower bias in law enforcement? Evidence from experiments with India’s rural politicians
Eri Bertsou - The ideological profile of citizens with technocratic attitudes
Alex Hartland - Institutions and Minority Representation: Asylum Rights Lobbying in Germany and the UK
Institutions and Minority Representation: Asylum Rights Lobbying in Germany and the UK
P3-03
Presented by: Alex Hartland
Alex Hartland
University of Manchester
Business lobbyists and other large interest groups leverage their resources to gain political access and influence policy directly. Citizen interest groups representing marginalised stakeholders such as asylum seekers lack the resources to gain political access and must rely on institutional arrangements to improve their strategic options. How do institutional arrangements affect the lobbying strategies of minority interest groups? Understanding the answer will improve the inclusion of minority groups in democratic policymaking. Consensus institutions and corporatist interest group systems should increase the quantity and quality of lobbying opportunities. However, asylum rights groups may mobilise public support to improve their political leverage in more responsive majoritarian institutions, while deregulated pluralist interest group systems may facilitate the use of informal lobbying channels.

Through analysis of 38 semi-structured interviews with asylum rights groups in Germany and the UK, I create a most similar comparative case study to argue that the quantity of opportunities created by Germany's consensus-corporatist system do not enable direct lobbying by minority groups any more than in the UK's majoritarian-pluralist system. However, the openness and collaborative norms created by Germany's corporatist interest group systems do improve the quality of working relationship between asylum rights groups and policymakers. This provides German asylum rights groups with high level access to lobby both their opponents and their allies, while UK groups remain excluded. This study therefore demonstrates the importance of institutionalised norms and identifies the mechanisms by which they can improve minority representation.