This chapter discusses the role of interest groups and lobbying in the EU. It starts by giving an overview of the number and types of interest groups active at the EU level and the different channels through which they try to exert influence. The system of interest representation in the EU is then analysed in terms of corporatism and pluralism, arguing that overall it is best characterized as a form of ’designed pluralism’. The strategies that interest groups use to influence policy-making are discussed in terms of inside and outside lobbying. Because of the way the EU’s political system works, inside lobbying is a much more common strategy at the EU level than outside lobbying. Although it is difficult to make an overall assessment of interest group influence, the impact that specific groups have depends crucially on the resources they command, the way the decision-making process is organized and the type of issue at stake. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relationship between lobbying and democracy, arguing that whether or not lobbying helps or is a threat to democracy depends on the balance between interest groups and the way in which lobbying takes place.

Rounding out Part 1, Kathleen Bawn, Knox Brown, Angela X. Ocampo, Shawn Patterson, Jr., John L. Ray, and John Zaller report results from one of the largest “on the ground” studies of candidate selection ever undertaken. Focusing on fifty-three potentially winnable open seat House races in the 2013–14 election cycle, the authors interviewed local participants and observers to probe the processes behind candidate selection in primary elections. The extensive fieldwork reveals that groups, which may include local party organizations, are the central political actors in the selection process. Voters rely on signals from the groups, whose primary objective is to minimize uncertainty about a candidate’s commitment to particular policy goals. Because this objective may lead groups to promote nominees who are not closest to the primary electorates’ ideological preferences, the candidates who win may be more ideologically extreme than even the primary electorates are. The chapter therefore highlights how analyses that focus on the general election, such as Chapters 2 and 6, are dependent on the candidates that emerge from the primary selection process.

Charles Cameron and Sanford Gordon continue the focus on governance by studying the incentives facing elected officials when voters rely on challengers and interest groups – ---"sentinels” – ---to sound “fire alarms” about incumbent behavior. The authors find that three factors affect the impact of sentinels: the verifiability of fire alarm information, potentially a critical issue in the age of “fake news”; the incentives of sentinels to withhold information, either to make incumbents look bad or to advance favored policies; and the ability of incumbents to counter sentinel bias through credit-claiming. Importantly, the presence of sentinels can lead incumbents to reduce the chance of bad news even at the expense of voter welfare, a perverse effect not fully eliminated by incumbent credit-claiming. The authors illustrate these insights with a case study of changes in the politics of criminal justice. The chapter concludes that fire- alarm oversight of incumbent politicians sometimes helps voters, but its potentially perverse effects render it a distant second -best to a fully informed electorate in ways that imply the media effects studied in Part II strongly affect elected officials.

While conventional accounts of the political landscape highlight Australia’s well-established formal institutions such as the electoral system, parliament, federalism, the public service and judiciary, a holistic approach to the study of Australian politics must also include the political contributions of a wider range of citizens and the various ways in which governments attempt to structure their input.

The chapter begins with a description of the organisational landscape of citizens’ groups in Australian politics and summarises the main advantages and drawbacks arising from the active participation and engagement of citizens’ groups.

The relative merits and drawbacks of government-initiated opportunities for citizens to contribute to political debate and public policy are then discussed with reference to theoretical modelling of community engagement.

The final section of the chapter examines the new challenges arising from the growing citizen participation and demand for community engagement in Australian politics. The discussion of these issues demonstrates how the participation and engagement of citizens’ groups is evolving in 21st century Australia.

In principle, voting is the mechanism by which citizen preferences translate into representatives’ action. If our theoretical expectations hold anywhere, we expect that it would be in a politically consequential setting such as elections. We address this possibility in Chapter 8 by analyzing a wealth of data on candidates and voting in state legislative elections as well as interest groups’ campaign donation and lobbying activity. We find that transparency laws do not improve the electoral chances of challengers. When a state opens its meetings, the pool of candidates does not change and incumbents’ vote share is barely affected. In contrast, the picture does change significantly for interest groups. We find that, in open meetings states, these groups’ donations to incumbents increase by substantial amounts while their contributions to challengers remain basically the same. Additionally, the size of the organized interest community is notably larger when a state holds open meetings. In short, an unintended consequence of transparency is that it facilitates interest groups’ capacity to seek access through elections and lobby state governments to achieve their policy goals.

In this chapter, I trace the evolution of the influential field of interest group theory from the 1920s to the 1950s. Two consequential things happened in this empirically oriented literature. First, the social ontology introduced by pluralists and theorists of process could be taken as given, accepted as factual descriptions of the political process. Second, community was reconceptualized and relegated to the status of a presupposition, now under the name of "consensus," invoked as a restraint on group conflict and a foundation for modern political life without being a topic of debate in its own right. This provided the discipline of political science with the rudiments of what would become an influential and lasting behavioralist solution to the problem of social order.

This chapter considers whether the Internet alters the relationship between protesters’ resources and legislative behavior. Gause argues that digital technologies reduce costs more for online protests than offline protests, making online protests less likely to receive legislative support. Moreover, digital technologies decrease protest costs; however, they do so primarily for high-resource groups. Nevertheless, digital technologies have changed the role of formal interest groups. In the past, formal interest groups provided resources that made it hard for legislators to detect issue salience. Online, viral collective action is more indicative of social media stimuli and influencers than high issue salience. Formal interest groups are now vital to legislative behavior.

To assess these arguments, Gause collects data on protests covered in 2012 in newspapers across the United States. Gause finds that legislators are more likely to support online protests than in-person protests. Whether online or offline, legislators are more likely to support costlier protests. Consequently, protest costs continue to dictate how legislators respond to protest demands.

Since the 1970s the American political system has undergone a dramatic increase in partisan polarization. By polarization, we mean that the parties are “far apart” from each other. This is largely, but not exclusively, a matter of policy views, although it may include important elements of identity-based tribalism. In a highly polarized environment, parties view one another as competing camps engaged in a battle where the stakes attached to victory or defeat are extremely high.

Over a month after 2020 election night had ended, the results of the presidential contest between former Vice President Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump seemed obvious to all except President Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party. Even as Biden’s victory over Trump became clear in the days following the election, a campaign unfolded to overturn the vote totals and deny Biden his victory. The most worrisome elements have involved armed supporters of President Trump threatening election officials with violence or death. No less extreme has been unprecedented litigation supported by seventeen Republican state attorneys general and more than half of House Republicans asking the US Supreme Court to reverse the election. The case is sure to lose. But in the process, broad swaths of the Republican Party leadership have indicated they are willing to use every institutional lever at their disposal to overturn public opinion as expressed in the voting booth.

Most democracies are representative. Elected by the people, representatives constitute a legislature and create laws. This is typically done through voting. This raises an interesting question of institutional design: should our representatives vote transparently or by secret ballot? No contemporary philosopher, to my knowledge, has addressed this question. In this chapter I argue that if we take seriously the value of political equality—a normative ideal that nearly all democratic theorists embrace—then voting among representatives in a legislature ought to occur by secret ballot. Representatives should vote just as citizens do in elections. Democratic equality, I argue, thrives in darkness.