Labanino, Rafael Pablo

Civil society broadly defined — from a local chess club through single issue advocacy groups to labor unions and business organizations — plays a crucial role in a democratic society. Groups represent and channel the interests of various groups of citizens towards policymakers and often provide (legal, technical, economic, scientific) expertise in policymaking.

However, as social science research has shown, the structure and the density (the number) of interest groups in a certain area matter. E.g., a denser organizational structure was famously connected with better democratic quality and governance by Robert Putnam. Conversely, Mancur Olson feared that too many interest groups can prove to be detrimental to the democratic process and economic development.

It matters whether big, encompassing organizations represent a societal group / an industry or many small ones in competition with one another. Similarly, the system of interest representation goes a long way in explaining political and economic outcomes in a country. Just think about the pluralist lobbying structure and the mostly firm-level wage bargaining (if at all…) in the United States and the formalized central bargaining between union federations, employers’ organizations and the state in Germany.

During the seminar, students will engage with the most timely and exciting themes of the interest groups/lobbying research field in political science (e.g., lobbying during the COVID pandemic, lobbying in the Bundestag, interest groups and civil society in the context of authoritarian populism and de-democratisation). With the help of contemporary cases and the most recent literature (also our own research at the University of Konstanz) the seminar introduces students to the main theories of interest groups/lobbying research (resource dependency theory, political opportunity structure, population ecology) and their implications.