Samtalet mellan lobbyister och folkvalda politiker - En intervjustudie om deliberativ demokratiteori på riksnivå

As Western democracies moved from a corporative to a pluralistic system of governance, the lobby organisations have gained a greater influence in the political process. These organisations have increasingly come to replace the previously institutionalised channels that represented the interests of citizens. Scholars disagree whether this is a desirable development or not. A central part of the research on lobbyism, and on the interactions between elected officials and organised interest groups, has been studying the character of the interactions and to what degree they satisfy the criteria of ‘ideal deliberation’, as defined by normative theories of deliberative democracy. However, previous studies usually only take one of the actors into account in exploring the interchange, either the elected politicians or the lobbyists, and thereby arrive at different conclusions. This thesis therefore aims to examine, within the framework of one study, how both elected politicians and lobbyists perceive their interactions, based on three dimensions of deliberation. By taking Habermas’s deliberative theory of democracy as a starting point, in addition to complementary empirical research within the field, this essay works out three analytical dimensions; (i) the motive, (ii) the means and (iii) the character of the conversation. Through interviewing nine elected politicians from the Committee on Environment and Agriculture in the Swedish parliament and six lobbyists from various environmental lobby organisations, as well as applying the three analytical dimensions to the collected material, I will examine how the real interactions meet the deliberative ideals. The results demonstrate that the responses of the politicians are generally more in agreement with the deliberative ideals than those of lobbyists. At the same time, the results reveal both similarities and differences in how they view the interactions. Expounding on this, my results are compared and contrasted to previous studies.