The existing literature on bias in interest group access faces the challenge that there is often no clear benchmark for judging whether a given distribution of interest groups involved in policy making is biased. To tackle this challenge, we link two new data sets on registered European Union (EU) interest groups and membership of the advisory committees of the European Commission and examine the factors affecting selection to these committees. Our approach allows us to qualify the conclusions of the existing literature. We see that, even if business interests dominate advisory committees, they are not generally privileged over other group types in the selection processes and their degree of access varies considerably between policy areas. Instead, supranational interest groups enjoy selection privileges, which are particularly pronounced on permanent committees. Finally, we find some evidence that, even though lobbying budgets are important for getting access, their value varies across group types. In this way, our study has implications for future theory building on resource exchanges between interest group types and decision makers.

Legislative politics scholars rely heavily on roll call vote (RCV) data. However, it has been claimed that strategic motives behind RCV requests lead to overestimating party group cohesion and, thus, biased findings on legislative behaviour. To explore this claim, we distinguish between two types of bias, a ‘behavioural bias’ and a ‘selection bias’. A recent rule change in the European Parliament, making RCVs mandatory on all final legislative votes, presents the unique opportunity to evaluate the latter. We compare party group cohesion in requested and mandatory RCVs by examining final legislative votes before and after the rule adoption using amendment RCVs (which still need to be requested) as a benchmark. The analysis shows that group cohesion is higher whenever RCVs are not just requested on some but mandatory on all votes. Hence, there is indeed a ‘selection bias’ in RCV data. Yet, somewhat contrary to former claims, relying on requested RCVs leads to underestimation of the cohesion party groups would have had were all votes automatically roll called. We argue that this is mainly because requests occur on more contentious votes.

This paper challenges both rationalist and constructivist approaches in explaining China’s foreign policy behavior toward multilateral institutions after the Cold War. Borrowing insights from socialization theory and operational code analysis, this paper suggests a ‘superficial socialization’ argument to explain China’s pro-multilateralist diplomacy after the Cold War. Using operational code analysis to examine belief changes across three generations of Chinese leadership and on different occasions, we argue that China’s pro-multilateralist behavior is a product of ‘superficial socialization’, in which Chinese foreign policy elites change their beliefs about the outside world and regarding the future realization of their political goals in multilateral institutions. However, Chinese policy makers have not changed their instrumental beliefs regarding strategies even in multilateral institutions. China is indeed socialized through multilateral institutions, but its scope is still far from the ‘fundamental socialization’ stage when states’ interests, preferences, and even identities change.

Conventional wisdom holds that in order to evade electoral punishment governments obfuscate welfare state retrenchment. However, governments do not uniformly lose votes in elections after they cut back on welfare benefits or services. Recent evidence indicates that some of these unpopular reforms are in fact vote-winners for the government. Our study of eight Danish labor marked related reforms uses insights from experimental framing studies to evaluate the impact of welfare state retrenchment on government popularity. We hypothesize that communicating retrenchment is a better strategy than obfuscating retrenchment measures. In addition, we hypothesize that the opposition’s choice between arguing against the retrenchment measure, or staying silent on the issue, affects the government’s popularity. Thus, the study presents a novel theoretical model of the popularity effects of welfare state retrenchment. In order to evaluate our propositions, we move beyond the standard measure in the literature and use monthly opinion polls to reduce the number of other factors that might affect government popularity. We demonstrate that governments can evade popular punishment by communication. They can even gain popularity if the opposition chooses not to attack. On the other hand, government popularity declines if the government obfuscates – and the decline is even larger if the opposition chooses to attack.

Democratic theorists often envision public deliberation as being essential to the working of democracy. Several scholars have also highlighted a potential for realising such deliberations on the internet. Consequentially, an emerging array of experiments in online deliberation has now been developed to achieve online discussions, which would be beneficial for democracy. However, few studies have yet attempted to compare the outcomes of online mini-publics to online citizens’ discussions in general. This article, thus, concerns an online experiment carried out in 2013 with the purpose of examining whether, and under which conditions, forums designed according to deliberative principles produce better ‘democratic outcomes’ – such as coherence of opinions, increased efficacy, trust, and propensity for civic participation – than online citizens’ discussions, which are ‘left to their own devices’. The study applies a post-test only, 2×2 factorial design, with a control group. In total, N=70 participants taking part in the experiment. The findings indicate that the effects of designing for deliberation were generally positive, albeit not for all of the democratic outcomes. In addition, methodological issues of relevance for the internal and external validity of the current experiment, which could be of relevance for future studies, are also brought forth.

Policy brokers and policy entrepreneurs are assumed to have a decisive impact on policy outcomes. Their access to social and political resources is contingent on their influence on other agents. In social network analysis (SNA), entrepreneurs are often closely associated with brokers, because both are agents presumed to benefit from bridging structural holes; for example, gaining advantage through occupying a strategic position in relational space. Our aim here is twofold. First, to conceptually and operationally differentiate policy brokers from policy entrepreneurs premised on assumptions in the policy-process literature; and second, via SNA, to use the output of core algorithms in a cross-sectional analysis of political brokerage and political entrepreneurship. We attempt to simplify the use of graph algebra in answering questions relevant to policy analysis by placing each algorithm within its theoretical context. In the methodology employed, we first identify actors and graph their relations of influence within a specific policy event; then we select the most central actors; and compare their rank in a series of statistics that capture different aspects of their network advantage. We examine betweenness centrality, positive and negative Bonacich power, Burt’s effective size and constraint and honest brokerage as paradigmatic. We employ two case studies to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of each algorithm for differentiating between brokers and entrepreneurs: one on Swiss climate policy and one on EU competition and transport policy.