This article provides a systematic literature review of the scholarly work on lobbying coalitions in political science, spanning the period from 1985 to 2023. By applying the PRISMA protocol for scoping reviews, the study maps the key trends, definitions adopted, research methods, and theoretical frameworks within this field, specifically focusing on the main explanations used to account for interest groups’ choice to form or join a coalition. The review reveals that the study of lobbying coalitions has grown in prominence, with a prevailing focus on the United States and the European Union and with a predominant use of large-N quantitative methods. The review identifies the dominance of behavioral definitions of interest groups and lobbying coalitions while also highlighting significant methodological gaps, particularly the underuse of social network analysis and qualitative comparative analysis. Furthermore, the study presents a meta-analysis of theoretical hypotheses, showing that the decision to form or join coalitions is primarily influenced by micro- and meso-level factors such as ideological affinity and issue salience. The review finds mixed empirical support for the idea that coalition formation serves as a ‘weapon of the weak’, with both weaker and stronger groups demonstrating likelihood of joining coalitions under certain conditions. The paper concludes by suggesting avenues for future research, including the further exploration of mixed-method designs and the potential for alternative methodological approaches to refine the understanding of lobbying coalitions.

Voters are frustrated by the influence of money in politics. They cannot be certain whether politicians follow the money or the will of the people. Disclosing side income may therefore serve as a means to increase trust in politicians. To investigate whether this mechanism works, we analyze data from a vignette survey experiment on parliamentarians’ side jobs with respondents from seven European countries (N $ \approx $ 14,100). Our results show that compared to parliamentarians who are unwilling to disclose their side income, transparent parliamentarians, even those with especially high extra-parliamentary earnings, are seen as more trustworthy and electable. We also find that voters rely on the combined information of the number and type of side jobs (companies versus public interest groups) when evaluating non-transparent parliamentarians. Furthermore, voters’ income, education level, and ideological leaning moderate their perceptions of (non-)transparent parliamentarians. Overall, our findings suggest that politicians’ disclosure of side income benefits representative democracy.

The failure of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been attributed to various organized interests, including the New Right and insurance companies. This study examines trends in lobby efforts regarding the amendment and correlations between lobby efforts and roll call votes among state legislators. Lobbyists active on the amendment appeared most often in states they perceived were most likely to approve. A second data set consisting of 6,952 votes reveals that explicitly pro- and anti-ERA lobby efforts were correlated with votes cast only by Republican state legislators. Lobby efforts by insurance companies were not correlated with any votes. The efforts of pro- and anti-amendment lobbyists, however, likely had no effect on the ultimate fate of the proposed amendment. Women and non-white legislators voted more often for the amendment, regardless of party. Moreover, changes in public support for the amendment led to partisan differences in legislators’ votes.

We argue affiliation with an American conservative legal movement key player, the Federalist Society (FedSoc), provides a low-cost, high-information cue to senators voting on nominees. We investigate how FedSoc affiliation shapes senator voting behavior on judicial nominations. Using a novel dataset of 35,602 roll call votes on all federal judicial nominations (1991–2020), we find Federalist Society affiliation dramatically impacts the likelihood of receiving a senator’s vote with Democrats less likely to vote for Federalist Society-affiliated nominees than Republicans across the federal judiciary. Senator ideology matters with more ideologically extreme Republicans – and more moderate Democrats – more likely to vote for FedSoc-affiliated nominees. Relatedly, Republican senators – regardless of their own affiliation with the group – reveal strong support for FedSoc affiliates. Taken together, we show nominee affiliation with the Federalist Society is a crucial cue when senators vote on judicial nominees.1

Corporations use financial contributions to gain access to influential policymakers. How do these actors respond when officeholders violate widely held norms, such as accepting the results of free and fair elections? We argue that businesses are sensitive to norm violations because they balance their economic interests with accountability demands from employees and other stakeholders. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that legislators who supported Donald Trump’s false claims about a ‘stolen election’ experienced a significant decline in contributions from Fortune 500 PACs in 2021 and 2022. Additionally, our analysis reveals that companies continue to contribute more to party leaders and members of key committees, consistent with our hypothesis. These findings suggest that corporations are willing to balance the interests of their two audiences by sending signals of disapproval towards those who violate established norms while continuing to lobby key lawmakers.

Health Technology Assessment international (HTAi) supports global collaboration and innovation in HTA through its dynamic network of Interest Groups (IGs). These thematic communities provide a dedicated platform for members to engage in focused, collaborative efforts that drive professional exchange, advance methodologies, and develop best practices in HTA. This commentary offers a panoramic overview of all IGs, their evolution, aim, and initiatives. By drawing on diverse stakeholder perspectives, spanning academia, clinical practice, industry, and patient communities, the IGs foster inclusiveness and extend HTAi’s influence to significantly contribute to the broader HTA community. Through activities such as workshops, conference sessions, webinars, publications, and research projects, they offer opportunities for professional development and thought leadership. The IGs’ cross-cutting contributions position them as engines of innovation to ensure HTAi remains at the forefront of shaping a globally relevant, responsive, and ethically grounded HTA ecosystem.

Regional governments are one of the largest but most understudied interest groups, employing a wide range of advocacy tactics like hiring professional lobbyists and face-to-face lobbying. However, we know little about why some succeed in influencing public policy while others do not. This gap arises because existing theories of interest groups and intergovernmental mobilization focus on resources—money and legitimacy—that regional governments typically lack control over. To address this, I propose a theoretical framework of intergovernmental lobbying success tailored to regional governments, emphasizing the convergence of five distinct conditions. Using new and original data on the 26 Swiss cantons’ influence on federal policy and employing set-theoretic methods (csQCA), I demonstrate that no single condition explains intergovernmental lobbying success. Instead, five causal pathways lead to a regional government shaping federal policy in line with its preferences. These findings have significant implications for understanding the effects of intergovernmental lobbying on representation, inequality, and unequal policy responsiveness, potentially contributing to rising political discontent, growing rural resentment, or citizen alienation.

The early 1970s was a tumultuous time for abortion law and policy in North Dakota where the defeat of an abortion liberalization initiative in 1972 was quickly followed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The resulting political and cultural circumstances strongly favored the North Dakota Right to Life Association, which saw much of its agenda passed by the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support. This study uses a political culture perspective to examine the development of North Dakota abortion law and policy in the years after Roe. It illustrates how the state legislature, interest groups, the bureaucracy, and the courts reacted to a series of disruptions in abortion policy. The resulting policies made abortion a continuing source of tension within North Dakota politics.

US politics is living a tense period of transformation. Approaching the presidential elections of 2024, many commentators question the fate of the US representative democracy and its political system. Political scientists have largely contributed to the critical analysis of the US case. A special mention goes to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The two scholars have marked the last two decades of US political science with a brilliant reconstruction of the American crisis and some of its key trends: the progressive increase of inequality; the mounting role of business lobbies; the decline of the US political economy and the erosion of the federal institutions. The present research note reviews three key books that shed light on contemporary US political economy through a typical political science approach. The value of these books goes well beyond the originality of the analysis of US politics. The books remind us the importance of three theoretical domains that marked political science and that merit to be further developed: interest group theory, neo-institutionalism and historical theories of democratization. Then, they shed light on the current dramatic tensions over representative democracies, well beyond the US exceptionalism. Hacker and Pierson provide an illuminating analysis of democratic tensions and give insights for the future research agenda of scholars of western political economies (including Italy and Europe). The books eventually outline some interesting methodological lines of future research.

Interest groups are an important influence in the subnational policymaking process. Previously, environmental policy scholars measured the strength of environmental groups in the American policymaking subnational process by using proxies like state-level group membership in major nationwide environmental organizations (e.g., Sierra Club). Although these prior measures of group strength have face validity, recent scholarship suggests that the utilization of group financial resources is a better measure of the influence of interest groups in state-level models. We take this approach and provide a new way to measure state-level environmental interests by using aggregated financial information (income and assets) from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data obtained via the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS). This measure provides several advantages over previous approaches because it varies over time, is derived from easily accessible public data, includes a greater diversity of environmental organizations, and it is considered reliable by prior scholars. We demonstrate its empirical value by deploying our measure in a model of state policy adoption. We encourage researchers to further utilize this new measure in their analysis of environmental advocacy at the subnational level.

Both European Union law and the European Convention on Human Rights offer an opportunity structure for a broad array of interests to pursue their objectives through strategic litigation. The spectrum of rights that litigants can claim is sufficiently broad that no consensus has emerged on the general consequences of such litigation. While much research has emphasized European law as a resource for civil society groups, EU law in particular has also been identified as a boon for businesses who challenge cornerstones of coordinated capitalism. This paper sets out to provide a better empirical basis for a normative evaluation of the consequences of strategic litigation in European law by asking who engages in it and who does not. It draws on data from a large-scale survey among interest groups in eight European countries. While results show significant differences in country-level litigation rates, the focus of this analysis is on the impact of group characteristics on the choice of litigation as a strategy. The findings confirm that litigation requires specific resources but highlight that groups with a prior interest in European affairs and those with antagonistic relations to national authorities are the most likely to turn to strategic litigation based in European law.

When observed in comparative perspective, until the early-1990s the Italian welfare state was clearly an outlier, characterized by an unbalanced allocation of resources among welfare sectors (so-called functional distortion) and towards social groups (distributive distortion). Since then, however, profound transformations have affected both the institutional architecture and the distributive profile of the Italian welfare state. Through an in-depth reconstruction of three decades of welfare reforms in Italy, this article shows how retrenchment and regulatory reforms in pension and labour market policies in an earlier phase (1992–2015), combined with the rather unexpected ‘expansionary turn’ in family and anti-poverty policies in more recent times (2016–2022), have partly reduced the comparative imbalances of the Italian welfare state, making it less of an outlier than in previous decades. To understand such puzzling developments, it relies on an explanatory framework centred on the interplay between socio-political demand and political supply, showing how the emergence of new coalitions, which for the first time mobilized latent social needs, combined with the reshuffling of the party system and the electoral success of parties challenging the austerity paradigm, quite unexpectedly contributed to make the Italian welfare state now look more ‘mainstream’ than in the past.