Political Cleavages and Interest Group Politics: A Comparative Analysis

Beyers, Jan. (2007) Political Cleavages and Interest Group Politics: A Comparative Analysis. In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 2007 (10th), May 17-19, 2007, pages 31, Montreal, Canada.

Abstract

For a long period the study of European interest group politics remained somewhat disconnected from other areas of European Union studies. There exists little cross-fertilization between the burgeoning literature on European party politics and political cleavages, on the one hand, and the literature on European interest groups, on the other hand. Although, recent scholarship has moved towards a more comparative approach, researchers still do not pay much attention to the possibility that a small number of political cleavages shapes the emerging European interest group system. This paper, which is part of a larger ongoing research project, aims to connect the study of interest group politics with the literature on party politics and political cleavages. The empirical corpus of the paper analyses data on political support networks among interest groups and political parties and uses German, Dutch, French, Belgian and EU-level elite survey-data. More in particular, I demonstrate that support networks between interest groups and political parties are structured according to traditional party political cleavages.