2012 Kristiansand Summer School on Interest Group Politics:
Group influence on policy agenda’s and political outcomes

July 17-26, 2012

The 2012 summer school covered the following aspects more in detail. First, we discussed the theoretical concepts of political influence and power. We looked at the “first and second faces of power” – the ability to influence during the agenda setting stage and the ability to influence during the policy making stage. We will devoted considerable attention to the conceptual strategies interest groups scholars used by discussing classic and recent conceptualization and its major problems. Second, we will studied recent research efforts as well as methodological innovations aimed at measuring influence including: preference attainment; self assessment; assisted and automated content analysis measuring policy positions and changes in position as well as assisted and automated content analysis measuring framing and dimensionality and related changes. In doing so, we reviewed and discussed some of the recent methodological innovations used in the interest group politics field to study interest group influence. This included introduction of software packages including Atlas-TI, WORDFISH, ALCESTE, T-Lab and others. More in concrete, we linked the 2012 summer school to some recently started research project on interest group activity in the European Union. As in the previous years, we involved various influential scholars working on the topic. The following scholars were part of the 2012 summer school David Marshall, Andreas Duer, Heike Klüver, Christine Mahoney, Caelesta Braun, Adam Chalmers and Jan Beyers.

Organizing Committee:

Prof. dr. C. Mahoney
University of Virginia

Prof. dr. J. Beyers
University of Antwerp

Phd Candidate T. Donas
University of Antwerp

Prof. dr. Jarle Trondal
Prof. dr. Stefan Gänzle
Agder University