Advocacy intelligence and competition: Assessing lobbyists' sharing of tactical knowledge in focus group interviews

Abstract

Advocacy intelligence is a critical organizational resource fostering long‐term survival and policy success. Policy‐active interest groups such as non‐profits, business associations and labor unions, seek to maintain their competitive advantage among peers and therefore have incentives to remain secretive about the details of their lobbying strategies and membership mobilization. We empirically evaluate this argument based on knowledge sharing interactions in 12 focus group interviews with approximately 50 representatives of interest groups in the Netherlands, Ireland and Denmark. Our research design manipulates the composition of the focus groups to vary the level of competition for political influence and membership among the participants. Strikingly, we find no evidence that either type of competition hampers knowledge sharing. Instead, our novel data point to three fruitful alternative explanations: the importance of socialization, mentorship and personalities of interest group leaders.

Online focus groups as a tool to study policy professionals

“…In what follows, we describe key considerations in a theory-testing approach to focus groups, illustrated with the research design of our project. As noted above, while our application of focus groups was used for non-probabilistic hypothesis testing (Junk et al, 2023), we think that our reflections are useful for researchers who consider using focus groups for diverse purposes.…”

“…Both when selecting participants for focus groups and when interpreting the findings, it is important to consider such alternative explanations (cf. Junk et al, 2023). At the same time, focus groups are arguably especially useful when researchers want to open the "black box" of unitary organizations (e.g., interest groups, parties, parliamentary committees, etc.)…”

“…Nevertheless, the factors that facilitate and hinder knowledge sharing between lobbyists have rarely been researched, arguably because traditional methods are not well suited to observe them. This is why we employed focus group interviews that allowed us to observe how organizational representatives share insights with each other in varying constellations (Junk et al, 2023).…”

“…In our case, the aim was to examine whether knowledge exchange between interest group representatives was hindered by organizational competition. This aim drove the design of the focus groups to test hypotheses formulated around two types of competition and knowledge exchange (see Junk et al, 2023).…”

“…We argue that this is a missed opportunity because focus groups with political elites are uniquely placed to combine the advantages of other methods to study policy professionals. Second, we suggest that the use of focus groups can be innovated by using them to empirically test hypotheses (Junk et al, 2023) rather than, as dominantly noted (e.g., Morgan, 1996), only being used for explorative research questions aimed at building theoretical propositions. Third, we propose that new opportunities to conduct focus groups online through video conferencing, rather than face to face, make them a feasible and affordable strategy for studying policy professionals.…”