Determinants of inside and outside lobbying strategies among Swiss and German interest groups

Political interest groups interact with their environment to communicate their points of view and to achieve political goals. However, lobbying consumes valuable resources,and interest groups have to decide which audiences to target and how to allocate scarce resources. Adopting a political economy view, we assume that the organizations we study behave as rational actors and allocate the funds earmarked for lobbying and communication in a way that maximizes the intended impacts. Recipients of communication perceived as more important are therefore expected to be targeted more often. In this article, we study what determines this perception of importance of four target groups of lobbying for Swiss and German interest groups: parties, the government, the media and the general public. More specifically, we examine how interest group characteristics influence the perceived importance of these target audiences. Examples of such characteristics, for which we derive hypotheses, are the sectors of activity of interest groups, the organizations’ size both in terms of individual and group membership, the overall annual budget, etc. To investigate the validity of the various hypotheses, a dataset derived from a survey among all politically active Swiss and German interest groups is used (response rate 40% and 23% respectively). For further analysis, we rely on ordered logit models to test which interest group characteristics influence the perceived importance of the four identified target audiences.