Interest groups constantly interact with elected officials and political parties. Are they really that influential, especially during election campaigns? A work by political scientists and sociologists shows that in France, no more than anywhere else, lobbies do not make elections.
Scientific work that has attempted to address the issue of lobbying from an electoral perspective is rare. With the exception of American political science, research addressing elections and interest groups respectively has remained compartmentalized: work on elections tends to focus primarily on the sociology of voters or on partisan positions, while research on interest groups rarely studies the influence of the electoral context on the actions carried out by these organizations (p. 14).
It is in response to this double occultation that a constituent group of the SPELL (Political Sociology of Elections) decided to focus on the activities of lobbies during the 2012 presidential and legislative elections. Guillaume Courty and Julie Gervais therefore analyzed 1,006 approaches made to political parties by more than 1,500 groups (associations, unions, employers’ organizations, think tanks, etc.) during the elections, mainly in France, but also in other countries such as Senegal. What does this electoral lobbying consist of?
Interest groups in constant interaction with the political field
The book shows that interest groups can maintain two types of relationships with the electoral context: contributors differentiate “those whose campaign activity is a variant of a continuous commitment over time, from those who seize in a more discontinuous manner the opportunities opened by an election considered “capital”” (p. 14). This results in a certain heterogeneity in the action repertoires mobilized by interest groups. G. Courty and J. Gervais do not fail to emphasize the importance of the historical context in the use of certain “pieces” (i.e. the means of action making up a repertoire): whether it is the official presentation of candidates, the development of programs, the mobilization in support of or in opposition to a party, or the public enrollment of candidates.
However, the preferential use of certain pieces by interest groups can also be explained by the consensual or conflictual nature of the cause they defend. For example, in their chapter devoted to the actions carried out by associations defending people with disabilities, Pierre-Yves Baudot and Anne Revillard do not fail to point out that the electoral campaign constitutes a difficult period for these associations whose cause is relatively consensual and which already benefit from access to the decision-making sphere. The action repertoire of these organizations will therefore be subject to this objective: “to be present, to reaffirm the importance of the issue, but without taking sides so as not to jeopardize the chances of relations with the future elected official” (p. 79). Their actions are therefore marked by a certain apoliticism, which aims to avoid conflict (p. 84).
Beyond the divisive or consensual nature of the cause defended by interest groups, P.-Y. Baudot and A. Revillard show the importance of factors internal to the organization in the choice of actions used (p. 79). Based on the study of the National Union of Senegalese Transport Workers, Sidy Cissokho thus demonstrates that the action repertoire mobilized by this structure during the Senegalese presidential election of 2012 was partially determined by the internal organization of this union, and in particular by the relative autonomy of its local sections (p. 157). However, despite the diversity of the action repertoires that the work presents, many contributors validate the observation of G. Courty and J. Gervais:
Whatever their degree of autonomy from the political field, campaigning groups resort to a repertoire of electoral action partly derived from the repertoire available in “routine” political life. (p. 20)
A programmatic influence that is difficult to measure
In a chapter devoted to the relations between the Socialist Party and police unions during the 2012 French presidential campaign, Rafaël Cos considers that it is difficult to assess the influence of unions on François Hollande’s security program (p. 106). Sophie Béroud and Anne-France Taiclet reach the same conclusion in their study of the Érasme Institute, and suggest abandoning the “postulate of a possible traceability of all the constituent elements of a political program” (p. 152). This programmatic influence is all the more difficult to describe since, in certain cases, intermediary actors can exercise a function of competition or mediation in relation to the demands made by interest groups, as Audrey Célestine and Aurélie Roger point out with regard to issues related to Overseas Territories (pp. 194-199). Similarly, the internal organization of certain groups, such as that of the think tank social-democrat Terra Nova, can be characterized by a certain sectorization (pp. 216-221), which makes it even more difficult to estimate their programmatic influence, due to a difficult to read “traceability”. R. Cos emphasizes that:
In the shadow of this classic vision of an intervention by interest groups focused on public policies and influence games, it is more the organizational chart games that attract the attention of the actors. (p. 106)
The book nevertheless highlights the diversity of careers following activism within these interest groups: while the programmatic conceptualization led by the Erasmus Institute would have, according to S. Béroud and A.-F. Taiclet, circulated beyond the promotion of the members of this organization (p. 146), Camilo Argibay recalls that Terra Nova constituted a recruitment pool for different ministerial offices during the five-year term of François Hollande (p. 225).
Furthermore, R. Cos demonstrates that contacts between two organizations can be structured around “strategies to circumvent the official organizational chart” (pp. 117-120). Let us also recall that, since 1995, French law has prohibited French interest groups from exerting this type of influence on parties, contributing to “the invisibility of groups in campaign by requiring them to place themselves outside the law, and out of reach of researchers, if they continue to provide funds during election periods” (p. 56).
Reinvesting American Literature and Anthropology
G. Courty and J. Gervais argue for an enrichment of the French literature on interest groups in campaigns. In their chapter devoted to American work on the subject, they note several fundamental points, including the definition of the three conditions of “salience” of an issue: “the first implies that the effects of the proposed measure are perceptible to voters, the second that the action to be taken is attributable to the elected government, and the third that the legislator benefits from a visible contribution to make to this action of the government” (pp. 74-75). The two authors also emphasize that, according to the work of KL Schlozman, S. Verba and HEY Brady, the capacity of interest groups to generate electoral mobilization would be quite weak. On the question of the stakes, G. Courty and J. Gervais affirm, in line with the research of PS Herrnson, RG Shaiko and C. Wilcox, that interest groups can advocate for a cause without specifically supporting a candidate.
The authors also criticize the thesis, developed by some supporters of the interactionist school, of a growing programmatic influence of American interest groups since 1996, noting the weak administration of proof that characterizes this work. The monographs produced in the United States do not confirm that the financial support provided by interest groups to candidates would lead them to integrate their political objectives into their program.
Furthermore, G. Courty and J. Gervais criticize the dominant trend of wanting to analyze political parties and interest groups separately (p. 228). On the contrary, the two political scientists argue for an approach that would include in the same analytical scheme the actions of “receivers” and “donors” (p. 228). Consequently, the authors suggest enriching the reasoning by using the work of Maurice Godelier and the conceptualization of electoral exchange proposed by Paul Veyne. The latter, drawing inspiration from Maussian notions of gift and counter-gift, distinguishes “the thing given and the act of giving”:
While American research has quantified and analyzed the content of the electoral exchange (“the thing given”) between candidates and interest groups, the act itself is not questioned and seems to go without saying. This position is based on a scenario of anticipation of the future – the famous preemption of the right of access – which prevails over the consideration of what is happening in the present time by “the act of giving”. (p. 231)
Indeed, the dominant analytical approach assumes that the gift will necessarily give rise to a counter-gift. Challenging this mechanistic vision of electoral exchange, G. Courty and J. Gervais propose to reinterpret the concept of “conditions of felicity”, dear to the philosopher JL Austin, to think about the exchange between lobbies and candidates. These conditions of felicity refer to a “coherent set of acts to be performed and formulas to be pronounced to put the recipient under the obligation to introduce a counter-gift into the exchange” (p. 239). However, according to the two political scientists, the absence of consideration of these conditions of felicity constitutes a blind spot for the analysis of interactions between lobbies and political parties: this concealment would mask the processes inciting candidates to respond to the expectations of the interest groups that support them.
The book therefore suggests going beyond an overly deterministic vision of these interactions, and calls for putting into perspective the exceptionality of the electoral context, which would not constitute a particularly propitious moment for lobby activism. Far from being aimed solely at political scientists and sociologists, this book will also appeal to ordinary citizens interested in the relations between the partisan sphere and interest groups, far from hasty simplifications and a certain ambient conspiracy theory.