Welcome to the ECPR Standing Group on Interest Groups
The ECPR Standing Group on Interest Groups promotes and supports research on group politics, civil society, social movement organizations and political advocacy. Membership of the SG is open to everyone who is interested in cumulative research on interest group politics. The SG functions largely as a forum and an exchange network for interest group researchers.
It provides updates on its activities via regular social media channels and anyone interested can subscribe to its newsletter via: https://listserv.uni-stuttgart.de/mailman/listinfo/ecpr-interest-groups
Upcoming events
Summer School in Reading in June 2023: see full programme and registration details: https://ecpr.eu/Events/230
Section at the ECPR General Conference in Prague in August 2023: Keep an eye on the programme on the ECPR website
Previous events
Online Roundtable on the 19th of January
See details in picture: recording available here
Section at the ECPR General Conference in Innsbruck
Ellis Aizenberg and Adria Albareda convened the Standing Group-endorsed section of eight panels (+ two panels supported in the open section).
Winners of the 2022 paper prizes:
The panel chairs and discussants in our standing group’s section of the 2022 ECPR General Conference put forward nominations for the best junior and senior papers. This was followed by an evaluation and discussion among three jury members. We are very grateful to Ellis Aizenberg; Adrià Albareda and Rafael Pablo Labanino for putting time and effort in evaluating the shortlisted papers.
The jury unanimously chose the paper titled “Is Virtue Its Own Reward? Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to British Policymakers” by Alvise Favotto, Kelly Kollman and Fraser McMillan for best paper award. The jury praises the paper’s innovative and impressive examination of the role that businesses and trade associations play in UK policymaking processes and the effect of organizational reputation and CSR in the relations between business and policymakers. The authors use a rich quantitative data-set complemented with qualitative interviews, strengthening the validity and reliability of their findings. Overall, the paper adds a novel interdisciplinary view to the literature which is at the frontiers of the interest group field.
The jury unanimously chose the paper titled “Citizens as Stakeholders in Consultations: Understanding the Amount of Citizen Participation in the European Commission’s Consultation Regime” by Idunn Nørbech for Junior prize. The jury praises the paper’s carefully designed quantitative analysis and interdisciplinary approach by bringing together the literature on citizen’s and interest group participation in EU policymaking.
Standing Group Business Meeting
At the ECPR General Conference in Innsbruck, we will organize a business meeting for members: more details will follow. There will also be a reception after the meeting; Our 2022 presentation can be downloaded here. During the meeting, Rafael Labanino, Michael Dobbins and Brigitte Horvath received the prize for the best paper presented at the 2021 General Conference.
Our previous standing group meeting was held at the Virtual ECPR General Conference in September 2021. Here we presented an overview of the activities the last year and discussed future activities with the standing group members. Our presentation can be downloaded here.
Presentations of earlier meetings can be found here.
