Business Groups and Advocacy Success: Insights from a Multi‐venue Approach

This study applies a multi-venue approach to assess whether business groups are more likely to realize their policy preferences than citizen groups. Conceptually, it measures the advocacy success of interest groups that are involved in the various institutional venues visited during entire policy-making processes (i.e., executive, legislative, judicial and direct democracy). Empirically, it compares interest group advocacy across three different policy issues (i.e., railway infrastructure, stem cell research and promotion of renewable energy) in both pluralist California and neo-corporatist Switzerland. The findings show that, when controlling for the political system, policy issues and advocacy strategies (i.e., single- or multi-venue), business groups display higher levels of advocacy success than citizen groups.