rulemaking have demonstrated that consultations do indeed lead to policy changes (Golden 1998; Klüver 2009; 2011; 2012; Yackee 2005: 3). When it comes to the issue of which interests are heard, it has often been argued that sectional groups – and in particular business groups – are better equipped to lobby than cause groups. The costs and/or benefits associated with government policy are more concentrated for business firms than for members of cause groups, business groups are well endowed with informational resources, and their members control society’s production capacity (Dür and de Bièvre 2007; Lindblom 1977). Empirical results concerning the influence of business in government consultations are mixed. Yackee and coauthors find that businesses often come out as winners (McKay and Yackee 2007; Yackee and Yackee 2006) and so do Jewell and Bero (2006), whereas Golden and Klüver find that issue characteristics are more important than group type (Klüver, forthcoming: 1129; Golden 1998: 261). on a resource exchange logic of influence (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Bouwen 2004) we propose a new argument linking the effects of group type to policy area. According to this argument the likelihood that business groups mobilize and are successful depends on how valuable their resources are to decision-makers regulating a specific policy area. Business groups’ lobbying resources are not equally relevant to decision makers across all issues. Specifically, we expect business groups to be more successful than other groups in relation to business regulation, but not in relation to what we define as general regulation or public sector services. The role and importance of external interests thus depend on the type of policy a particular government agency is dealing with. This implies that a potential bias may not be found across all policy areas, but only in relation to policies where the specific resources of business groups put them in a favorable position.
amendments. Other groups argued in favor of the bill and made no suggestions for changes (373 groups) or simply misunderstood the bill (five groups). This reduced the sample so we were able to estimate the impact of 1,314 group responses: 613 (47%) group responses resulted in full or partial accommodation by the ministry. Measures of group and policy type All interest groups responding to at least one consultation were given a unique ID number allowing us to trace their pattern of activity across all consultations. Business groups were defined as any group with private companies or industries as members. 136 (33%) out of 416 groups responding to consultations represent business, and they produced 694 responses to consultations, constituting 41% of the 1,692 responses in the data. The policy area of all bills was registered according to the codebook used by the policy agenda project (see: www.agendasetting.dk). The areas were then recoded depending on whether the area could best be classified as: 1) business regulation: agriculture, labor market, environment, energy, and business and consumer regulation; 2) general regulation: macroeconomics, civil rights, immigration, justice, housing, foreign affairs, EU, local and regional politics, and other; and 3) public sector regulation: the state church, health, education, culture and sports, traffic, defense, and research. In the multivariate analysis this variable is combined with the group type variable to create dummy variables for business groups and other groups respectively with regard to each policy area. Table 1 shows the distribution of the three policy types. Table 1 Policy types according to group responses and consultations