Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz

• PhD
• Professor at Aarhus University

A key issue for interest groups and policymakers is the ways through which organized interests voice their interests and influence public policy. This article combines two perspectives on interest group representation to explain patterns of interest group access to different political arenas. From a resource exchange perspective, it argues that acc...

Involving interest groups in public committees is a crucial feature of policy-making in many democratic systems. This article investigates how the composition of committees in Denmark has developed from 1975 to 2010, with specific focus on interest group seats. We argue that the committee system has been adapted in response to societal changes. We...

This paper provides the first systematic cross-country analysis of interest group appearances in the news media. The analysis included three countries – the UK, Spain and Denmark – each representing one of Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) three overall models of media and politics: the liberal system, the polarized pluralist system and the democratic co...

Studies of the political role of interest groups rely on mapping their presence in politics. This article presents the INTERARENA research project which mapped interest group access to the administration, parliament and the news media across several countries. The project departed from a definition of access that emphasized the role of gatekeepers...

Media attention is a scarce, yet attractive, resource for interest groups. Existing studies show that media attention is concentrated on a relatively small number of well-resourced groups, often representing economic interests. However, the literature still struggles to disentangle the reasons behind this bias in media attention. Is it explained by...

Recent research has documented a significant and rising presence of corporations in politics. In this letter, we ask to what extent corporations in Denmark have increased their political activity and access to political arenas during the last two decades. The analysis draws on two surveys among large corporations conducted in 2001 and 2022. This al...

A crucial aspect of elite dominance in modern democracies concerns the degree to which different political elites share similar career paths and shifts between different elite positions. Similarity in career paths and transfers across elite positions are crucial aspects of elite dominance in modern democracies. This paper argues that there are limi...

A series of studies have identified gender bias in teaching evaluations in higher education—with women being evaluated lower than men. However, other recent studies indicate that gender bias is not present across all contexts. Our study adds to the understanding of the role of gender in teaching evaluations by focusing on a Danish university—a nati...

Significant progress has been made in mapping the media efforts as well as the media coverage of policy advocates such as interest groups, think tanks and private corporations. However, less attention has been devoted to connecting media efforts to media coverage. In this research note, we therefore ask: To what extent do the media-targeted activit...

I 2003, da Magtudredningens hovedrapport udkom, var historien om interessevaretagelse i dansk politik i høj grad et spørgsmål om de organiserede interessers samspil med politiske myndigheder. I løbet af de seneste 20 år er kredsen af eksterne aktører, der arbejder med interessevaretagelse, blevet langt bredere, og professionelle lobbyfirmaer spille...

A series of studies have identified gender bias in teaching evaluations in higher education – with women being evaluated lower than men. However, other recent studies indicate that gender bias is not present across all contexts. Our study adds to the understanding of the role of gender in teaching evaluations by focusing on a Danish university – a...

Governmental entities such as the EU Commission regularly consult societal stakeholders. In such consultations, a variety of different tools are used ranging from open online consultations over stakeholder conferences to discussions in closed policy fora. Recent research has demonstrated how the range and diversity of the consulted actors vary acro...

A series of studies have found gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. Evidence from several observational studies show that women are evaluated lower than men. These findings are supported by experimental studies aimed at isolating the effect of a possible gender bias from other differences between male and female teachers. In this paper,...

A growing body of studies analyzes interest groups’ media visibility. Yet little is known about how the drivers of media access may vary across different interest group systems. This article focuses on two major mechanisms through which organizations can gain media visibility: media management efforts and the newsworthiness of elite actors. We hypo...

The role of gender in the interaction between citizens and public sector employees attracts increasing attention. Notably, gender effects have been described in performance evaluations across different contexts. With respect to student evaluations of teaching, a series of observational studies as well as experimental studies have found that women a...

Studying patterns of interest representation in politics is a central concern of scholars working on interest groups and lobbying. However, systematic empirical analysis of interest group representation entails a large amount of coding and is potentially prone to error. This letter addresses the potential of two computational methods in enabling la...

While a multitude of studies have investigated the link between opinion and policy, we have little knowledge of how and when organized interests affect this linkage. We argue that the alignment of organized interests affects opinion‐policy congruence by influencing the weight decision‐makers attach to citizen preferences. Moreover, we propose that...

This chapter is a tour of the Scandinavian lobbying landscape providing the state of the art for research on a contested and necessary activity. We discuss the particular context of the Scandinavian countries and current trends relevant for lobbying. Lobbying is often juxtaposed with the corporatist channel which implies institutionalised contact p...

The EU Commission regularly consults with external actors when preparing policy proposals. This paper investigates possible bias in the voices the Commission listens to across all policy areas and consultation instruments. We map the full range of consultation instruments used by the Commission and analyse variation in group representation across t...

In recent decades, interest groups in Denmark have become more professionalized. Many interest groups have large, professional secretariats, and even smaller groups have strengthened their administration. At the same time, researchers point to the emergence of a group of policy professionals occupying positions in management, politics and organizat...

I de seneste årtier er der sket en øget professionalisering af interessevaretagelse i Danmark. Mange interesseorganisationer har i dag store, professionelle sekretariater, og selv mindre organisationer har oprustet deres administration. Samtidig peger forskere på, at der er opstået en gruppe af policyprofessionelle, som indtager positioner i forval...

This article analyzes interest group representation and framing in the news media. In contrast to previous work, it focuses on the role of the policy area in shaping the types of groups appearing in the media and the frames used by groups. Empirically, the analysis maps group representation and framing across six different policy areas in the Danis...

Members of parliament are accountable to both their district and party. Consequently, they have to balance their responsiveness to these competing principals when their preferences diverge. Existing research on this representational dilemma focuses mostly on the role of political institutions, whereas this article offers a new individual-level expl...

Appearing in the news media is crucial for interest groups. When making a media presence, groups carefully frame their messages to push political processes in their preferred direction and to maintain organisational support. This article provides a cross-country comparison of the frames used by interest groups appearing in the news media. The artic...

En række internationale studier har vist, at kvindelige undervisere får dårligere evalueringer end deres mandlige kolleger. Artiklen undersøger, om det også er tilfældet i en dansk kontekst. Artiklens analyser bygger på evalueringer foretaget på Aarhus BSS, hvor et fælles evalueringsskema bruges på tværs af uddannelser, der varierer ganske meget i...

International studies have found a gender difference in student evaluations where female teachers are evaluated lower than their male colleagues. This article investigates whether this is also the case in the Danish context. The article draws on evaluations from Aarhus BSS where a common procedure is in place for evaluating all teaching across stud...

While the Nordic countries have a tradition of integrating privileged interest groups into policy making, a number of studies have argued that this Nordic ‘routine corporatism’ has changed over the last decades. Studies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden demonstrate that interest groups are less frequently involved in committees preparing policy, that l...

The political influence of interest groups manifests in different ways. Interest groups may affect which political problems attract attention as well as the political decisions aimed at solving these problems. Crucially, different types of groups may be successful in respect to these different dimensions of influence. Economic groups have been desc...

Over the last several decades, a number of societal changes can be expected to have led to the increased mobilization of interest groups representing citizen interests. For this mobilization to be effective, citizen groups need to win access to relevant political arenas. This article investigates the development of the Danish interest group system...

The promises and pitfalls of automated (computer-assisted) and human-coding content analysis techniques applied to political science research have been extensively discussed in the scholarship on party politics and legislative studies. This study presents a similar comparative analysis outlining the pay-offs and trade-offs of these two methods of c...

Interest group research has focused extensively on political access. While access does not guarantee influence, it is customarily seen as a crucial step towards gaining political influence. It is argued that groups with access are, all else equal, more likely to be influential than groups without access. Biased access may thus result in biased infl...

This article provides the first systematic cross-country analysis of interest group appearances in the news media. The analysis included three countries – the UK, Spain and Denmark – each representing one of Hallin and Mancini’s 1 three overall models of media and politics: the liberal system, the polarized pluralist system and the democratic corpo...

The contribution analyses whether the factors affecting perceived interest group influence on political agendas differ depending on whether groups lobby in their own domestic context or seek influence at the European Union (EU) level. Findings from a multinomial logistic regression analysis based on survey responses from 1,723 domestic interest gro...

Interest groups work to influence politics. Come election time, groups have an interest in affecting the composition of parliament and government. On their side, parties value the resources groups can contribute to election campaigns. Active electioneering by groups entails risks, however, as some voters and group members may be offended by close i...

The relative influence of business interests in the formulation of public policy is disputed, and empirical results remain inconclusive. Business groups are generally expected to be more successful than other groups in influencing public policy because they are able to deliver detailed and technical knowledge about their sector and because the welf...

Interest groups may approach political decision makers in two phases of the legislative process: the pre-parliamentary, administrative phase, in which bills are prepared by bureaucrats; and the parliamentary phase, in which bills are discussed and possibly revised by parliamentary committees. The article investigates the factors that lead groups to...

Executive Summary Interest groups pursue a wide range of policy goals. In their attempts to realize these goals, groups may lobby bureaucrats and politicians, approach the media and engage in protest activities. This article investigates the relation between the characteristics of policy goals and the strategies of influence utilized by interest gr...

A prominent presence in the news media is important for interest groups. This article investigates the development in the diversity of interest group media attention over time. The analysis draws on a dataset of 19,000 group appearances in the Danish news media in the period 1984–2003. It demonstrates how diversity has risen continually over time,...

Public management reform has drawn inspiration from principal agent theory and private management, and a favored reform strategy has been civil service reform that strongly recommends pay-for-performance. The hypothesis tested in this paper is that the incentive effect will improve public sector management. The basis is the performance management s...

Public sector reforms introducing performance contracts provide a unique opportunity to investigate goals set for government agencies and factors affecting goal attainment. The article maps the set of goals contained in performance contracts for Danish government agencies in 2000, 2005, and 2008. Performance contracts are found to reflect the compl...

Public bureaucracies are increasingly characterized by employee diversity in terms of ethnicity. Investigating relations between ethnic groups in bureaucracies is therefore important. This article focuses on the particularly interesting case of the Greenlandic administration. Being a former Danish colony, Greenland still recruits bureaucrats from m...

How broad do groups spread their engagement across the spectrum of public policy issues? The orthodoxy for some time has been that groups tend to focus their engagement rather narrowly. Some suggest that groups shy away from competition and pursue niche-seeking behaviour. Others argue that resource limitations constrain both the monitoring behaviou...

The article tests the argument that group–membership relations vary between public interest groups and other types of groups. While public interest groups draw their members from diffuse constituencies supporting the causes of the groups, sectional groups exhibit a closer correspondence between the interests advanced and the members recruited. Acco...

Performance contracts entered between ministerial departments and their agencies are used throughout the Danish central government. The article analyzes the use of performance contracting in 2005. The analysis draws on transaction cost theory and actor-centered institutionalism, stressing the bargaining aspect of hierarchy and the importance of eco...

In the early 1990s the Danish Ministry of Finance initiated an experiment where a few ministerial departments negotiated performance agreements with their agencies. Since then internal contracting has spread and is now nearly universally used in central government. However, a close study demonstrates that in this process contract content has change...

The news media are frequently accused of portraying politics as a strategic game rather than focusing on political issues. However, the understanding of the prevalence of different news frames in the media coverage of politics is limited in several respects. This article seeks to contribute to remedying this by (1) conducting a longitudinal analysi...

The article compares the political activities of different types of interest groups. Drawing on data from a survey of all Danish national interest groups, it demonstrates significant variation in the strategic choices of different types of groups. Groups with corporative resources direct much attention towards influencing the bureaucracy. They poss...

The literature often contrasts interest groups possessing insider status and outsider groups forced to seek influence through more indirect means. Drawing on data from a survey of all national Danish interest groups, this article demonstrates that most groups have an action repertoire including both direct contacts to bureaucrats and parliamentaria...

Research has shown that interest organizations seeking influence on public decision making pay increasing attention to parliamentary actors. No distinction has, however, been made between attempts to affect law-making directly and attempts to gain influence on other parliamentary activities such as agenda setting and control of bureaucracy. Drawing...