Does Transnational Advocacy Matter? The Importance of Interest Group Coalitions for National Climate Policies

Time: 
20.05.2019 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location : 
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Type of Event : 
AB B-Kolloquium
Lecturer: 
Prof. Kai Schulze
Lecturer affiliation: 
TU Darmstadt
Description: 

Interest groups have become increasingly involved in international politics over the past decades. Previous research highlights the role of interest groups in international arenas and how international actors influence domestic policymaking. Much less research effort, however, has been devoted to the transnational advocacy of national groups and, in particular, to the question whether such efforts are successful. This paper addresses this gap by studying the impact national interest group coalitions active at the international level have on national climate policy. To this end, we use an extensive global dataset including the adoption of national climate change legislation and all interest group mobilization at international climate conferences from 1997 to 2016. Our results show that international mobilization by climate policy supporters promotes the adoption of national climate change legislation but the effect decreases with rising mobilization by climate policy opponents. By contrast, opponents are only effective in the presence of strong supporter coalitions. These findings have important implications for our understanding of interest group politics in multilevel settings and suggest that lobbying dynamics can be more complex than previous research suggests.