See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/304983231

Toward a Population Ecology Approach to Transnational Advocacy? An Emerging

Research Field

Chapter · January 2015

DOI: 10.1057/9781137514318_4

CITATIONS READS

0 46

2 authors:

Jan Beyers Marcel Hanegraaff

University of Antwerp University of Amsterdam
77 PUBLICATIONS   2,015 CITATIONS    19 PUBLICATIONS   112 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Small states and the EU View project

Exploring direct subsidies to interest groups in the EU View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Marcel Hanegraaff on 11 July 2016.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Chapter 9
Towards a Population Ecology Approach of Trans-National
Advocacy? An Emerging Research Field

Jan Beyers & Marcel Hanegraaf

Department of Political Science
University of Antwerp
Beyers Jan [email protected]
Marcel Hanegraaff [email protected]

The number and scope of transnational organizations has risen markedly during the

past decades. According to the Union of International Associations (UIA) each year over a

thousand transnational organizations are established, and as a result in 2012 the UIA

estimated the existence of no less than 7,608 intergovernmental and an astonishing number

of 56,834 non-governmental organizations (see www.uia.be). Given the sheer size of

political organizations active in transnational political processes, this chapter argues that

the global environment provides an extremely rich setting for studying the organizational

development of interest group communities. Unfortunately, interest group scholars have

not yet taken full advantage of this rich laboratory, to our opinion mostly because the

literature on transnational advocacy developed rather separately from existing interest

group studies. We nonetheless see many parallels and overlaps between these literatures,

for instance in terms of key research questions that are asked as well as methodological

issues. This chapter therefore reviews the transnational advocacy literature from an

interest group perspective and in doing this we aim to identify the common ground

between both fields as well as some relevant challenges.

Interest group studies is a booming field characterized by an growing accumulation

of knowledge. One of the reasons for this is that scholars increasingly use equivalent

theoretical concepts that allow us to analyse interest group behaviour in highly different

1
political systems. Instead of considering interest group politics as an entirely contextualized

theme in need of idiosyncratic theories, European and American scholars increasingly rely

on common theoretical tools that consists of a number of interconnecting, mostly mid-

range, theories related to the different stages of the influence production process. As a

result, scholars approach research questions in similar ways and often test hypotheses that

apply to a variety of political contexts. All this makes that research results become more

comparable, which has strengthened the cumulative nature of this research field.

The study of transnational interest groups politics, nonetheless, remained largely

disconnected from studies of other political systems. This does not mean that transnational

interest group research shows no linkages with the broader interest group literature or

organization theories more generally, including the population ecology approach (PE

hereafter). When delving deeper into this literature one gets struck by the fact that scholars

of transnational advocacy deal with highly similar research problems, methodological

issues and often arrive at conclusions that correspond well with findings reported in other

literatures. Rather, the main difference between the transnational advocacy literature and

the interest group literature is how the units of analysis – the interest group or civil society

organization – are positioned in a broader explanatory framework. Interest group scholars

often have the organizational development, strategies and influence of interest groups as

their explanandum. In contrast, scholars of transnational advocacy usually study organized

interests with the purpose to understand – as an explanans of – international political

events and outcomes such as the emergence of global norms, the democratic legitimacy of

international organizations (IOs) and regimes or the accountability of international

organizations. To put it different, studies in the field of transnational advocacy are, in

2
general, interested in macro-level implications such as how the density and diversity of

non-state political mobilization affect the structure and nature of the international political

order. This is a perfectly legitimate and interesting approach, especially in the field of

international relations. However, it means that it is not always easy to bridge the

boundaries that exist between both literatures and that cross-fertilization remains limited.

It is only a very recent development that scholars from both fields started to seek more

common ground (e.g. Bloodgood 2011; Hanegraaff et al. 2011; Tallberg et al. 2013).

In this chapter we provide a review of the state-of-the-art in studies of transnational

advocacy. More specially, we will sketch how the mapping of transnational interest group

communities has developed over the past decades and where we see an overlap with PE

studies more broadly. We will distinguish between studies that take a bottom-up view and

focus on the emergence of group mobilization, on the one hand, and studies that take

politically active groups as a starting point for assessing transnational interest system. This

distinction is relevant because it points to a pertinent problem in studying interest groups,

especially at the global level, namely what are the boundaries of interest communities.

Finally, we will develop some avenues for future research, and in particular show how

establishing more linkages and cross-fertilization between the varying literatures on

interest communities may help us to strengthen this research agenda.

Characterizing the research field

There are not many studies on transnational advocacy that build explicitly on PE-

models, but, interestingly several studies have been conducted that adopt a highly similar

approach. Roughly, we can distinguish between two types of studies, which can be classified

according to a top-down versus bottom up perspective (Berkhout and Lowery 2008).

3
Interestingly, both approaches produce different types of populations with, depending on

the type of research question, clear benefits and disadvantages.

Bottom-Up Mapping

One the one end, we have bottom up studies that aim to provide a comprehensive

overview of the interests represented in global political processes. A crucial advantage of

mapping studies is that they provide an accurate account of the mobilization potential of

specific interest group segments, but an important downside is that this approach is less

directly suited to measure actual political activities of transnational interest groups.

The key data source in this field is the UIA database. One of its advantages is its

longitudinal nature – starting in 1875 – and the fact that data on both establishing and

disbanding are updated on a yearly basis. Nonetheless, there are some important

limitations, which implies that special care is needed when analyzing the data and that,

most of the time, recodes are required. For instance, inclusion in the database is voluntary;

it relies entirely on the interest of individual organizations to be listed in the dataset. This

could lead to the exclusion of organizations that for some reasons were not willing to

register with the UIA or organizations that are simply unaware of its existence. Second, the

primary focus of the database lies with what is called ‘transnational or global’

organizations, which means that most national organizations that lobby at the international

level are not part of the dataset. 1 However, as we will show below national organizations

1
The database includes two types of ‘national organizations’. First, ‘internationally oriented national
organizations’ (the so-called category G; N=7,770/year=2012) and ‘national organizations’ (category N;
N=3,057/ year=2012). However, many of the organizations listed in the G category are not domestic interest
groups, but are based in one single country. Therefore, these are coded as a national organizations. Examples
are the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, International Association of Machinists and
Aerospace Workers, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, or the World Development Movement. It is
somewhat odd to characterized these as national organizations. Category N, the genuinely national
organizations, is rather small. To give an example, the UIA lists 3,057 national organizations (in 2012),

4
entail a substantial proportion of all societal interests that lobby beyond national borders.

In general we could identify three types of bottom-up studies; studies aiming to

map all global organizations, studies focusing on one specific organization type and studies

concentrating on a particular field. In one of the earliest studies, in 1971, Kjell Skjelsbaek

presented a then comprehensive overview of transnational interest groups. Based on the

UIA database he provides a detailed account of this phenomenon, i.e. the domains in which

these groups are active, the geographical representation of these interest groups, the scope

and intensity of their activities, and the interconnections between these groups. Although

Skjelsbaek’s approach was largely descriptive, it points to the value of some key PE

concepts. For instance, he shows that a disruption in stability has a tremendous negative

impact on growth rates (see also Boli and Thomas 1998, 175), that extinctions (death rates)

are higher in more dense environments, that growing densities coincide with higher levels

of specialization or niche behavior, the importance of a resource rich environment and that

government activities trigger an increased mobilization of groups. In addition to the rapid

increase and strong representation of economic and western-based groups, he makes two

other relevant observations which resonate in later research projects. First, a large number

of transnational NGOs played a pivotal role in establishing national based organizations.

Instead of national movements leading to transnational activities and international NGOs,

the process of group creation often works the other way around whereby the trigger for

domestic group creation comes from the outside. Second, Skjelsbaek is cautious in making

strong causal claims about the importance of government activities. There is clearly a link,

whereas, for instance, at the UN climate conferences alone 4,343 national organizations where present (since
1995). This suggests that the UIA database vastly underestimates the number of national organizations that
engage in transnational advocacy.

5
but in several instances transnational interest group mobilization precedes and even may

be instrumental or pivotal in developing international regulatory regimes and/or

international organizations. For instance, often there is a strong exchange of staff – a

revolving door as group scholars would call it – between IOs and transnational interest

groups.

After Skjelsbaek’s pioneering work it was not until the 1990s, after the end of the

Cold War, that scholars started to give renewed attention from a systematic population

perspective to explain aggregate patterns of transnational advocacy. In an attempt to

identify the role of non-state actors in creating a world culture and polity, Boli and Thomas

(1997) describe the evolution of transnational interest groups between 1875 and 1973 (see

also Thomas 1999). Note that transnational non-state actors – interest groups in our

parlance – are conceived as ‘direct evidence about the structure and operations’ of the

international system, world culture and world polity. Boli and Thomas’ approach builds

strongly on organization theory, more precisely sociological institutionalism as advanced

by John W. Meyer (1980). Based on the UIA yearbook, they delve into structure and aims of

transnational interest organizations in terms of the principles of universalism,

individualism, voluntaristic authority, rational progress, and world citizenship, all aspects

they consider central components of world culture. One of their key claims is that

transnational interests groups contribute significantly to processes of legitimation of

organizational forms – including international governmental organizations – that emerge at

the global level (Boli and Thomas 1998, 179-180). As they state: ‘More often than is

commonly acknowledged, the resulting organizations prove to be effective. If they are

absorbed in a formal global authority structure in the future, it may well be said that the

6
road to a world state was paved by the rational voluntarism of INGOs’ (Boli and Thomas

1997, 188).

Another example of bottom-up studies was conducted by Global Governance Centre

(GGC) of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Although the centre ceased

to exist in 2011, it provided an annual yearbook including a comprehensive overview of

global civil society organizations as registered in the UIA database as well as more in-depth

analyses of some issue areas such as human rights, environmental governance, peace or

labor. One notable observation throughout the annual yearbooks is the spectacular growth

of transnational interest organizations in almost all issue areas. While Skjelsbaek projected

on the basis of a growth rate of 5% a year a population of about 9,000 organizations for

2000 (Skjelsbaek 1971, 434), the actual estimates are about 25,000 for 2001. An important

development noticed is that this tremendous growth also corresponds with a high rate of

disbanding, a proliferation of organizational forms as well as considerable pressures

towards organizational isomorphism. Typical is that transnational organizations are

characterized by a multi-level organizational structure with local, national, regional

branches that are nested in a global networks. One highly pertinent conclusion the scholars

involved in this project point out is that future transnational interest group studies should

pay more attention to how national organizations are vertically integrated in transnational

structures (see for instance Anheier et al 2001; 2005; see below).

Beckfield’s 2003 study offers a nice example of this view. Rather than focusing on

which transnational interest groups exits, he aims to explain the density and diversity of the

transnational interest group population by analyzing the link between transnational

interest groups and domestic interests (based on panel data from six panels between 1960

7
and 2000). His main conclusion is that the density and diversity of transnational interest

groups is largely explained by resource variables situated at the domestic level, whereby

the transnational interest group population is skewed towards rich, core, western states

and societies. More importantly, this skewness has not reduced since the 1960s. On the

contrary, increasingly transnational interest groups are rooted in rich countries. Another

study analyzing resources situated at multiple levels of government is Lee (2010) who

explains the uneven growth of INGOs in 126 countries. For this purpose, he tests two

competing theoretical perspectives; on the one hand an explanation focusing on the degree

to which a country is integrated in international organizations and the international

economy, and on the other hand, domestic factors such as democracy and economic

prosperity. His analysis suggests that both economic and political factors at the global and

national level explain the rise of INGOs, rather than viewing either in an isolated fashion.

Rather than aiming to analyze the total population of transnational organized

interests, a second set of bottom-up studies concentrated on one type of organized interest.

Typical examples can be found in the social movement literature where for specific

research purposes all social movements are filtered out of the UIA yearbook. One example

are a series of papers published by Jackie Smith (Smith 2005; Smith and Weist 2005; Smith

2006). 2 This work is largely cross-sectional and, interestingly, it points at the limited

carrying capacity of the global level by demonstrating that the growth of the transnational

interest group population is not infinite (Smith 2006, 420). Smith observes most growth in

the late eighties and the nineties, growth that can be related to political agendas, more

precisely the growing number of conferences organized by the UN and other international

2 To our knowledge, there are no studies that map only transnational business association.

8
organizations (Keane 2009, 716-21; see also Keck and Sikkink 1998; Werker and Ahmed

2008). Since the beginning of century there has been a decline in the number of

organizations, which corresponds with increased hurdles transnational advocates face in

realizing some of their policy objectives (see also Davies 2008).

The third set of bottom-up studies focused on certain issue areas, such as

environmental governance or human rights. For instance, Meyer et al. (1997) demonstrate

the rise of transnational environmental interest groups as part of a more general

development namely the emergence of a world environmental regime in the latter half of

the 20th century. In contrast to former studies the authors are not so much concerned with

the representative nature of transnational interest groups, rather they see it is a

consequence of increased attention by international organizations for environmental issues

– such as United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – and the gradual emergence of

a world polity as well as specific epistemic communities in the field of climate change and

environmental policy. Another example of an issue-field centered study is Tsutsui and

Wotipka (2004) who examine patterns of participation by national citizen organizations in

the global human rights movement through memberships in transnational human rights

interest organizations (see also Wotipka and Tsutui 2008). The two papers by Tsutsui and

Wtipka are especially interesting because they try to integrate domestic and international

level explanations in one model. After showing enormous growth in the number of human

rights groups between 1980 and 2000, they analyze whether country level characteristics

or global developments have increased the participation in the international human rights

movement. Interesting is that the strongest predictors of expanding involvement

transnational human right organizations are the embeddedness in global civil society and

9
international flows of human resources. The effects of these international factors grew

stronger over time while, according to the authors, domestic factors became less important.

Top-Down Mapping

Another way to characterize transnational interest group politics is to start from an

existing political venue or arena and map all organizations that are politically active at a

specific moment in time. Such a top-down mapping means that organizations are not

qualified as being part of the set of transnational advocates based on their mere existence

(as in the case of bottom-up mapping). The starting point for mapping transnational

interest group communities from a top-down perspective are the political activities various

societal interests deploy at the global level. While bottom-up studies mostly assess the

potential of mobilization, top-down mapping looks primarily to those organizations that

effectively materialized their potential to become politically active. Another difference is

that an a-priori categorization of organizations as being global or transnational is avoided;

all stakeholders that aim to seek policy influence at a global venue are included in the set of

transnational advocates, irrespective of whether these groups have primarily a domestic or

national constituency or whether they are organized at a global scale. This implies that the

set of so-called transnational societal interests might look quite different and may include

domestic interest groups that are also active at international political venues. Therefore, the

outcomes of top-down and bottom up studies may result in a rather different

characterization of transnational advocacy.

Most of these top-down studies are rather recent (from the 2000s) and map interest

10
mobilization at global political venues only since the mid-1990s. 3 As a result, there are far

fewer studies that apply a top-down approach to map transnational interest communities

compared to studies that start from a bottom-up perspective. Moreover, due to the shorter

history, the focus thus far has been on only a limited number of international organizations,

most prominently the WTO and the UNFCCC (both the Conference of the Parties as well as

the Subsidiary Bodies).

The WTO, and in particular its main decision-making body the Ministerial

Conference (MCs hereafter), is the first type of IO of which the interest community was

mapped in full. Various scholars have studied attendance rates at WTO Ministerial

Conferences (MC) in an attempt to better understand patterns of transnational lobbying

over time. This can be pretty easily done because the WTO offers a comprehensive register

of all organizations that attended any of the MCs. The first systematic analysis of the MC

interest group community was provided Martina Piewitt (2010) who coded all attending

interest groups according to organization type. Hanegraaff et al. (2011) took the analysis

one step further. Rather than focusing on group type only, they offered a longitudinal

analysis of the domestic origin as well as the issue areas in which groups are active.

Moreover, they were the first ones to apply a specific PE perspective – by using concepts

such density, diversity and volatility – to describe patterns of transnational advocacy. In a

recent paper, Hanegraaff et al. (2014) linked participation rates of interest groups at MCs to

constituency support and political energy at the domestic and international level, thereby

providing the first actual test of the ESA-model to explain the development of a

3 One notable predecessor is the excellent overview of Charnovitz (1996) which offers an historical account of

interest group participation at several IOs as early as the 18th century up to the end of the 20th century.
Starting with non-state activists against slave trade he works his way up to the massive involvements of
interest groups at various IOs in the latter half of the 20th century.

11
transnational interest group community. Their results indicate that several of the

mechanisms that underlie the main PE-model provide a useful explanation for the

magnitude of transnational advocacy, such as the link between resource supply in the

domestic context and political attention at the level of international organizations.

A second political venue that has been analyzed extensively is the UN climate

conference. Again, because registration is required, a full map of the interest community

can be constructed. First, Muñoz Cabré analyzed the development of issue diversity and

issue linkages between interest group participants at the UNFCCC Conferences of the

Parties (COPs) between 1997 and 2010. His results show that the growing density of this

interest group community entails also more diversity. Nordang-Uhre (2014) provided a

more thorough analysis of the same interest community, linking the development of

diversity to several key economic variables in order to explain patterns of bias. Moreover,

he too applied a PE perspective as he tried to connect the development of diversity in an

explanatory framework on how this interest group community developed. Hanegraaff

(2014) established the most comprehensive dataset of the COPs by going beyond the set of

accredited organizations and including all organizations that participated at the

conferences. Based on an extensive dataset consisting of 6,655 unique interest

organizations he shows the importance of organizational characteristics for successful

mobilization at UN climate summits. Finally, Schroeder et al. (2012) analyzed the interest

groups that participated at COPs as part of government delegations. They observe an

increase in interest group involvement in national delegations, which they interpret as an

indication of the agenda-setting influence of societal interests. However, it is national

governments who decide on who gets included in these delegations, which is again

12
something that may reinforce the biased nature of transnational advocacy.

Lessons Learned and Ways Forward

Based on this overview, we see two issues that need further attention in order to

move towards a PE perspective of transnational advocacy. First, there needs to be a more

common characterization of what constitutes as a transnational interest group community.

This is necessary because population ecology theories start from the assumption that

interest communities show clearly demarcated boundaries. Interest organizations are also

conceived as being interdependent, in a broad sense. For instance, interest groups react to

each other, either explicitly (e.g. start lobbying if other interest groups pay attention to an

issue) or implicitly (e.g. exit from a lobby community results from oversaturation, namely

all niches are occupied). Many claims in population ecology approaches depend on a clear

notion of what an interest group community constitutes, namely which organizational

entities are part of a particular community. Second, many of the studies reviewed above

contain ingredients that sound familiar to population ecologists, but there are only a few

studies that specifically start from this theoretical perspective. For instance, with some

exceptions, few scholars of transnational advocacy have explicitly looked at density

dependence mechanisms or niche behavior. Nonetheless, the PE approach to the field of

transnational advocacy has the potential to integrate several of the, seemingly unrelated,

findings we discussed earlier into a comprehensive and interconnected framework.

About the first, one of the most significant observations is that the characterization

of transnational interest group communities depends strongly on conceptual and

methodological decisions. For instance, as argued before, if one adopts a top-down

perspective we observe that national organizations outnumber transnational organizations

13
by far and increasingly so. A bottom-up approach is not a problem if one is mainly

interested in studying global or transnational organization pure sang, but it is limited in

order to identify the full set of societal interests that are politically active at the

international level. Then, a bottom-up approach ignores a large portion of interest groups.

This brings us to a key issue, which is both definitional and operational, and is

related to how we define the boundaries of an interest group community. It is striking how

different various scholars define their units of observation and analysis, and this conceptual

problem resonates in the UIA datasets where we find national groups with some

international orientation alongside large global federations of national-based groups under

the same heading of a global NGOs. Moreover, the self-registration of UIA also makes that

the conceptual vagueness and different understandings that exists in the field – i.e. among

the groups themselves, for instance on what concepts such global and transnational mean –

is reflected in the quality of the data. The multi-level nature of transnational advocacy also

implies that not all PE concepts can be easily transferred to the global level. For instance,

death and birth rates or organizational maintenance are notoriously difficult notions as

many transnational advocacy groups never formally dissolve, but for various reasons (for

instance resources) shift the level at which they are politically active. Instead of disbanding,

we are, similar as in studies focusing on sub-national versus national level lobbying (see for

instance Lowery and Gray 1995), often confronted with temporary hibernation as groups

are able to seek resources from multiple levels of government.

This multi-layered complexity entails that a PE approach for transnational

advocacy can only be fruitful if it is accompanied with a careful analysis of organizational

form (Anheier and Themudo 2002). We cannot just restrict ourselves to the counting of

14
organizations, but also need more in-depth research on the fact that global interest

organizations take highly different and diverse forms, and more importantly, adapt their

organizational form over time in response to evolving circumstances. For instance, while

Amnesty International started as a small voluntary grass-roots based movements it

gradually evolved into a global professionally steered organization, with professionally runt

membership-based branches in more than 150 countries. Therefore, organizational entities

counted twenty years ago differ highly from contemporary forms and rough counts over

time ignore such qualitative changes in organizational form (Minkoff 1999; Halpin and

Jordan 2009; Halpin et al. 2011; Fraussen 2013).

In our own projects on the WTO Ministerial Conferences and the UN Climate

Summits we tried to account for the multi-layered complexity by creating different codes

for the ‘nationality’ of an organization. For a considerable number of organizations we

identified it was pretty easy as they generate and invest most of the resources in one

country and as their activities are focused (for the most part) within one particular state.

Yet, for a large set of organizations this is not that easy. Therefore, we made a distinction

between two types. First, we coded the level where the key resources (members, finance,

subsidies, supporters, constituency of an organization, etc.) originate from. All

organizations were coded at the lowest level possible, ranging from global, regional,

national to subnational. Second, we coded the level where the most resources are spent and

invested, for instance in terms of political mobilization, aid or other expenditures: again

ranging from global, regional, national to subnational. This factor essentially concerns

where the beneficiaries are located. So, an organization that lobbies at the WTO but in favor

of American corn manufacturers is regarded as an American interest group in terms of its

15
political mobilization. On the other hand, a European NGO (that is an NGO that gets his

resources, i.e. sponsors, contributors, from within the EU), yet works in Africa is regarded

as an African interest groups in terms of the political mobilization (but, note, this would be

an EU NGO in terms of where resources originate from).

-- Table 1 About Here --

Typically, resource generating and resource spending do not necessarily correspond

(see table 1). Although most organization are active at the same level where they get their

resources from (n=1417, 73 percent, diagonal), in about 27 percent of the cases we observe

a discrepancy between level of mobilization and the levels where the organizations raise

their resources. We have 313 organization that get their resources from the subnational

and national level, but invest their resources (in various ways) at the regional or global

level (16 percent of the population, or 23 percent of the subnational and national

organizations). These are what Tarrow would label as ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ (Tarrow

2005). An example of such an organization is a Dutch organization active on the issue of

debt and poverty in Africa. Still, most organization are nationally rooted, i.e. raise and invest

their resources at the national level (n=1023, 52 percent). A small number of transnational

activists are global or regional and invest their resources at the subnational or national

level (n=53, 3 percent). In total, we have 480 truly transnational players, i.e. regional and

global organizations (25 percent). Yet, if we would add the rooted cosmopolitans to the

global/regional organizations that are active at the national level, we find that in total

480+313+53=846 (43 percent) organizations have a global or regional outlook. 4

The benefit of making a distinction between where resource dependencies are

4That these observations are not a coincidence is corroborated by the fact that we found similar patterns at
UNFCCC climate conferences.

16
located and where the political interests are situated is that we can more accurately apply

PE approaches to explain transnational interest communities. That is, a PE perspective

explicitly assumes that organizational exit and entry rates are driven by a combination of

different types of resource dependencies, namely resource dependencies at the level of

members (i.e. the area term) as well as resource dependencies located in terms of political

attention (i.e. energy term). If we were to rely only on where interest groups get there

resources from or where resources are spent, we are prone to over- or underestimate the

impact of the area or energy term.

Furthermore, it would be misleading to conceptualize transnational advocacy only in

vertical terms, namely as if organizational interdependencies primarily run from the local

level via the national to the global level. Most transnational interest groups have a

decentralized structure whereby organisational forms may vary considerably from country

to country. The importance of allowing considerable decentralization and autonomy for

national branches makes that transnational interest group entrepreneurs operate not only

at a large scale, but also in a highly complex context in which organizations are tied to each

other in a variety of ways (i.e. from the local to the global, vice versa, and horizontally).

These complex forms of cooperation between interest groups in transnational politics

should be addressed in future PE research. In this respect, , it might be fruitful to analyse

how ties between interest groups affect the exit and entry rates of interest groups in

transnational interest group communities. Currently, population ecology takes a pretty

individualistic view, namely it looks at exit and entry rates of individual interest groups,

whereas we know that very few organizations lobby on their own. Most groups work in

networks or coalitions and this is especially the case in multi-layered political systems such

17
as the transnational political system (Anheier et al. 2002; Tallberg et al. 2013). That is

many, but not all, organizations have (formal and informal) ties with other organizations

before they start attending international conferences and often there will be exchanges

between domestic and global organizations in advance of a global conference.

One interesting hypothesis is that such pre-existing ties ease transaction costs for

transnational advocates and are an important resource-base that explains varying exit and

entry rates. Ties with other organized interests (or policymakers) mean that one gets better

acquainted with specific domain related intricacies. Such information advantages feedback

into lobbying strategies and increases the expected change of success related to specific

strategies. Moreover, success breeds more success and stimulates advocates to remain

active. Therefore, pre-existing coalition and networks are very likely to affect exit and entry

rates of individual interest groups in transnational advocacy communities. Nonetheless,

although the idea sounds highly plausible, there has been little systematic research on how

the dynamics of coalition formation and social networks affect the emergence of

transnational interest group communities. We believe that this could be an important route

for future research on the population ecology of transnational interest groups. This domain

provides an excellent case to test such network-related hypotheses because quite some

observers demonstrate that the number and density of complex organizational forms – such

as network-based organizations – in a number of transnational political processes has been

growing during the past decades (Anheier et al. 2002; Tallberg et al. 2013).

The second key issue that should gain more attention is the actual application of a PE

perspective to explain the development of transnational interest communities. While

several of the studies that were discussed in this chapter use rather similar concepts that

18
have a strong PE flavor – such as the importance of resourced dependencies and political

attention – other concepts such as density dependency, niche seeking, or isomorphism are

much less used in the transnational advocacy literature. One implication is that research on

transnational advocacy needs a shift from a strong focus on macro-level outcomes, i.e. how

societal mobilization at the international level affects international policy outcomes or the

global political order, towards meso-level or organizational level approaches. This does not

mean that big questions become less important. Rather, it means that big (and important)

questions should and need to be asked about how organized interest communities develop,

for instance on how these organizations depend on national politics (see for instance the

work by Tsutsui and Wotipka). What we learned from previous studies is that domestic

politics is still highly important for transnational advocates, which makes it is somewhat

puzzling that the political science literature on domestic and global interest group politics is

still so bifurcated. Yet, in reality both types of advocacy are highly intertwined and often

driven by similar mechanisms. Many international organizations keep registers of whom

they consult and invite at key meetings, which also demonstrates the importance of societal

interests for international policymakers. All this is good news as is makes sophisticated

longitudinal population studies feasible.

Given the two rather distinct ways to map transnational interest group

communities, i.e. the bottom-up and top-down approach, an important question is what

would be the best way forward to test basic PE hypotheses? There is no clear-cut answer as

much depends on the specific question one aims to answer. Questions related to

development, death, and birth rates of transnational interest groups might be best served

by applying a bottom-up approach. As a result it is pretty easy to map and trace which

19
organizations are founded, and which organizations seize to exist. Although not explicitly

linked to a PE perspective, the studies of Skjelsbaek (1971), Boli and Thomas (1998),

Beckfield (2003), Lee (2010), and Smith (2005) are excellent examples of this type of

research. However, it is still a bit unclear what some of their observations actually mean. If

many of the organizations mapped in bottom-up research do not show any trace of political

activity, one cannot claim that exit and entry rates relate to political energy generated by

IOs, which is a key component of population ecology. Therefore, we are somewhat more

inclined to use top-down approaches for studying how concrete transnational interest

communities develop. As argued, a crucial advantages of top-down mapping is that it is

clear that the organizations under scrutiny show some political interest and activity, and, as

a consequence, their activities – plus potential hibernation – can be meaningfully linked to

the agendas of a concrete IO (see for instance Hanegraaff et al. 2014; Hanegraaff 2014).

Conclusion

In this chapter we provided an overview of contemporary studies that deal with

transnational interest group populations. We distinguished between two distinct

approaches that are currently used in the literature, i.e. a bottom-up and a top-down

approach, and described the benefits and down-sides of both perspectives. Although a PE

perspective has only marginally been applied to explain the development of interest

communities, many of the main premises that underpin the PE framework also resonate in

this literature: such as the importance of resource availabilities, political attention, and the

sustained activity of interest groups. For this reason we see it as a logical next step to

integrate these insights further and apply more explicitly a PE perspective to explain the

development of transnational interest communities.

20
 We see some important benefits associated with using a PE perspective in studying

transnational advocacy. First, while, as said, many of the separate ingredients underlying a

PE perspective are used by various scholars, one benefit of an integral PE approach is that it

brings together these, seemingly unconnected, factors in one comprehensive explanatory

framework that is geared to the development of organizational communities. A second

benefit of the PE perspective is that is provides an important avenue to trace and better

understand patterns of interest group representation over time. If transnational interest

systems are new and show high levels of volatility, as is often the case, this means that it is

relatively easy for new organizations to enter a policy venue. Thus, transnational interest

group communities show much room for newcomers. On the other hand, when interest

group communities mature, turnover of organizations may decrease, meaning that it

becomes harder for new groups to enter the interest group community. As such, a deeper

understanding of how interest group populations develop over time, and an understanding

of the level of maturity of interest group systems, provides several additional tools to

understand how the representative nature of transnational advocacy develops.

Finally, analyzing transnational interest group communities also provides several

key advantages to develop the PE literature further. First, because many IOs have only

recently opened up to societal interests and made data available, it is possible to study

interest group communities at the very early stage of their development. Also it is possible

to compare the development of these new interest group communities with more mature

interest groups systems. In contrast, most interest group communities in domestic settings

have existed for many decades and can therefore be characterized as rather mature.

Studying transnational interest group communities therefore provides a rich laboratory to

21
see how new interest group communities develop into maturity. A second benefit lies in the

unique nature of transnational interest group communities. At first sight, transnational

interest group communities seem to be a rather odd context for testing PE propositions.

Yet, based on results in some recent studies that did apply a PE approach to explain

transnational interest communities, it appears that many of the crucial presumptions

underlying the PE perspective seem to be applicable in this field, such as the combined

importance of resource dependencies, political attention, and density dependency (see

Hanegraaff et al. 2011; Hanegraaff 2014). Although tentative, this is an important testimony

that a PE perspective provides us with a highly comprehensive framework for analyzing

how interest group communities develop irrespective of the particular institutional setting

wherein these interest group communities are situated.

22
 Table 1. Level Where Key Resources Originate From Versus
Where Resources are Invested at WTO-MCs (N and Percentages)

Level where resources are retrieved from

Subnational National Regional Global Total Percent

Subnational 108 5 0 2 115 6%

Level where National 10 965 16 43 1034 53 %

resources Regional 6 123 179 60 368 19 %

are invested Global 7 182 21 237 447 23 %

Total 131 1275 216 337 1964 100%

Percent 7% 65 % 11 % 17 % 100%

Note: own data (e.g. Hanegraaff et al 2011)

23
 References
Anheier, H.K., M. Kaldor, and M. Glasius, eds. 2005. Global Civil Society 2005/6. Thousand

Oaks: Sage.

Anheier, Helmut, and Nuno Themudo. 2002 "Organisational Forms of Global Civil Society:

Implications of Going Global." In: Anheier, H.K., M. Kaldor, and M. Glasius, eds. 2005.

Global Civil Society 2005/6. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Anheier, Helmut, Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor. 2001. "Introducing Global Civil Society"

In: Anheier, H.K., M. Kaldor, and M. Glasius, eds. Global Civil Society 2001/2.

Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Beckfield, J. 2003. “Inequality in the World Polity: The Structure of International

Organization.” American Sociological Review 68 (3): 401-24.

Berkhout, J. and D. Lowery. 2007. "Counting Organized Interests in the EU: A Comparison of

Data Sources" Journal of European Public Policy 15(4): 489-513.

Bloodgood, E.A. 2011. “The Interest Group Analogy: International Non-Governmental

Advocacy Organizations in International Politics” Review of International Studies

37(1): 93-120.

Boli, J. and G.M. Thomas. 1997. "World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of Non-

Governmental Organization" American Sociological Review 62(2): 171-190.

Charnovitz, S. 1996. Two Centuries of Participation: NGOs and International Governance.

Michigan Journal of International Law 18, 183.

Davies, T. R. 2008. The Rise and Fall of Transnational Civil Society: The Evolution of

International Non-Governmental Organisations since 1839 (Report No. CUTP/003).

London, UK: Department of International Politics, City University London.

24
Fraussen, B. 2013. The Visible Hand of the State: On the Organizational Development of

Interest Groups. Public Administration 92: 406–421

Halpin, Darren, C. Daugbjerg, and Y Schvartzman. 2011. Interest Group Capacities and

Infant Industry Development: State-Sponsored Growth in Organic Farming.

International Political Science Review 32 (2): 147-66.

Halpin, Darren, and Grant Jordan. 2009. Interpreting Environments: Interest Group

Response to Population Ecology Pressures. British Journal of Political Science 39

(2): 243-265.

Hanegraaff, M. 2014. “Business as Usual? The Development of Representational Skewness

and Balance at UN Climate Summits” In: All the World’s a Stage, Dissertation M.

Hanegraaff, Antwerp, April.

Hanegraaff, M. C. Braun, D. De Bièvre, and J. Beyers. 2013. “The Domestic and Global Origins

of Transnational Advocacy: Explaining Lobbying Presence during WTO Ministerial

Conferences” Paper presented at ISA conference, April 2013.

Hanegraaff, M., J. Beyers, and C. Braun. 2011. "Open the Door to More of the Same? The

Development of Interest Group Representation at the WTO" World Trade Review

10(4): 1-26.

Hanegraaff, M, J. Vergauwen and J. Beyers. 2014. “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Explaining

the Exit and Entry of Interest Groups at UN Climate Summits” In: All the World’s a

Stage, Dissertation M. Hanegraaff, Antwerp, April.

Keane, J. 2009. The Life and Death of Democracy. London: Simon and Schuster.

Keck, M. E. and K. Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in

International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

25
Lee, T. 2010. “The Rise of International Nongovernmental Organizations: A Top-Down or

Bottom-Up Explanation” Voluntas 21 (3): 393-416.

Lowery, D., and Gray, V. 1995. The Population Ecology of Gucci Gulch, or the Natural

Regulation of Interest Group Numbers in the American States. American Journal of

Political Science 1-29.

Meyer, J. 1980. “The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State. Studies of the

Modern World-System” In: Bergesen, A. ed. Studies of the Modern World-System.

New York, Academic Press: 109-137.

Meyer, J. W., Frank, D. J., Hironaka, A., Schofer, E., and Tuma, N. B. 1997. ‘The Structuring of a

World Environmental Regime, 1870-1990” International Organization, 51(4): 623-

651.

Minkoff, D. C. 1999. Bending with the Wind: Strategic Change and Adaptation by Women's

and Racial Minority Organizations 1. American Journal of Sociology 104(6), 1666-

1703.

Muñoz Cabré, M 2011. “Issue-linkages to Climate Change Measured through NGO

Participation in the UNFCCC” Global Environmental Politics 11(3): 10-22.

Olson, Mancur 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Piewitt, M. 2010. “Participatory Governance in the WTO: How Inclusive Is Global Civil

Society?” Journal of World Trade 44(2): 467-88.

Schroeder, H., M.T. Boykoff, and L. Spiers, 2012. “Equity and State Representations in

Climate Negotiations” Nature Climate Change 2(12): 834-836.

26
Skjelsbaek, K. 1971. “The Growth of International Nongovernmental Organization in the

Twentieth Century” International Organization, 25(3): 420-442.

Smith, J. 2005. “Globalization and Transnational Social Movement Organizations” In: Davis,

G.F., D. McAdam, R. W. Scott and M. N. Zald, eds. Social Movements and Organization

Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, J. 2006. “Social Movements and Multilateralism.” In: Neuman, E., R. Thakur and J.

Tirman, eds. Multilateralism under Challenge? Power, International Order, and

Structural Change. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

Smith, J. and D. Weist 2005. “The Uneven Geography of Global Civil Society: National and

Global Influences on Transnational Association.” Social Forces 84 (2): 621-52.

Tallberg, J., T. Sommerer, and T. Squatrito. 2013. The Opening Up of International

Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance. Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press.

Tarrow, S. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. New York, Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, G. M. (Ed.). 1999. Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental

Organizations since 1875. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Tsutsui, K., and Wotipka, C. M. 2004. “Global Civil Society and the International Human

Rights Movement: Citizen participation in Human Rights International

Nongovernmental Organizations” Social Forces, 83(2): 587-620.

Nordang-Uhre, A.N. 2014. “Exploring the Diversity of Transnational Actors in Global

Environmental Governance” Interest Groups and Advocacy 3(1): 59–78.

Werker, E., and F.Z. Ahmed. 2008. “What do Nongovernmental Organizations Do?” The

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(2): 73-92.

27
 Wotipka, C. M., and Tsutsui, K. 2008. “Global Human Rights and State Sovereignty: State

Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties, 1965–20011” Sociological

Forum 3(4): 724-754.

28

View publication stats