About
The Australian Interest Groups (AUS_IG) project provided the first quantitative, data-driven assessment of the size, scope and operation of the Australian interest group system.
The project was funded by Australian Research Council grant DP140104097 to Professor Darren R. Halpin at the Australian National University. Funding commenced in 2014 and finished in 2017.
This site catalogues the published outcomes of the project and provides access to the data it produced. We hope it serves as a resource for current and future researchers of Australian interest groups, and for comparative scholars.
Project
Organised interest systems that seek to influence public policy-making are undergoing rapid transformation. What is the scope of this change? What drives it? And what is its impact on policy-making in modern liberal democracies?
Some researchers focus on the post-war professionalisation of advocacy; others suggest that the internet is positively (re)shaping the structure of such systems and their democratic capacities. This project adjudicates between these accounts by exploring the size and composition, through time, of the Australian system of organised interests, how these groups are organised, and whose interests are most prominent in the policy process.
The project developed four themes:
Size and composition
How many groups are there? To what extent do traditional economic interests dominate? How prominent are internet-based groups? Answers are compared across the formal political arena, the print media and online.
Organisational capacity and new technologies
Has the dominant group form shifted from membership-based, to professionalised, to internet-based organising? Are organisations like GetUp! part of a broader trend, and what does this mean for groups as democratic actors and sources of policy expertise?
Agenda setting and issue prioritisation
Groups cannot chase every issue. How do they decide which to prioritise, and do member-driven groups take a more bottom-up approach than staff-dominated organisations?
Comparative perspective
Findings are compared with research in the United States and the United Kingdom to identify the political and institutional features that most strongly shape interest representation in Australia.
People
Professor Darren R. Halpin
Chief Investigator · Professor of Political Science, Australian National University
Darren researches and writes about organised interests in politics (interest groups, think tanks, corporations and lobbyists) and political representation, and the connections between the two.
Dr Bert Fraussen
Postdoctoral Fellow on the project · now at Leiden University
Bert's research and teaching focus on lobbying and interest representation, and on how interest groups and think tanks engage with policymakers to shape public policy.
Key collaborators
Several researchers worked with the core team on data collection, preparation, analysis and publications:
- Herschel F. Thomas (University of Texas at Austin): organised interests, lobbying and agenda-setting in the US, UK and Australia.
- Timothy Graham (Queensland University of Technology): machine learning to identify group prominence in Australian parliamentary Hansard.
- Anthony J. Nownes (University of Tennessee): survey measures of interest groups' policy priorities.
- Robert Ackland (Australian National University): Twitter data on the social media activity of interest groups.
Publications
The project produced a large number of publications in international and Australian political science, public administration and public policy journals. If you need access to material not listed here, please contact us.
- Fraussen, B., Halpin, D. and Nownes, A. (2020) ‘Why do interest groups prioritise some policy issues over others? Explaining variation in the drivers of policy agendas’, Journal of Public Policy, Online First. PDF
- Groemping, M. and Halpin D. R. (2019) ‘Does group engagement with members constitute a ‘beneficial inefficiency’? Governance, 32(3),511-529. PDF
- Fraussen, B., Graham, T., and Halpin, D. (2018) ‘Assessing the prominence of interest groups in parliament: A supervised machine learning approach’, Journal of Legislative Studies. 24(4) 450-74. PDF
- Halpin, D., Fraussen, B., and Nownes, A. (2018) ‘The Balancing Act of Establishing a Policy Agenda: Conceptualizing and Measuring Drivers of Issue Prioritization within Interest Groups’, Governance, 31(2) 215-237. PDF
- Fraussen, B. and Halpin, D.R. (2018). ‘How do interest groups legitimate their policy advocacy? Reconsidering linkage and internal democracy in times of digital disruption’. Public Administration. 96(1) 23-35. PDF
- Halpin, D. and Fraussen, B. (2019) ‘Laying the Groundwork: Linking Internal Agenda-Setting Processes Of Interest Groups to Their Role in Policy Making’, Administration and Society, 51(8) 1337-1359. PDF
- Fraussen, B., and Halpin, D. (2018) ‘Political Parties and Interest Organizations at the Crossroads: Perspectives on the Transformation of Political Organizations’, Political Studies Review. 16(1), 25-37. PDF
- Halpin, D. and B. Fraussen (2017) ‘Conceptualising the policy engagement of interest groups: Involvement, access and prominence’, European Journal of Political Research, 56(3) 723-32. PDF
- Fraussen, B., and Halpin, D. (2017). Think tanks and strategic policymaking: the contribution of think tanks to policy advisory systems. Policy Sciences, 50(1), 105-25. Winner of the 2017 Lasswell Prize for Best Article. PDF
- Fraussen, B., and Halpin, D. (2016). Assessing the Composition and Diversity of the Australian Interest Group System. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 75(4), 476-91. PDF
- Halpin, D. and Warhurst, J. (2016) ‘Commercial lobbying in Australia: Exploring the Australian Lobby Register’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 75(1) 100-11. Winner of the 2017 Sam Richardson Award for Best Article. PDF
Data
Replication data are available on Darren Halpin's Harvard Dataverse page.