Strategies, access and influence: a survey of interests groups in Chile

How do lobbies and interest groups achieve their goals? To answer that, this article explores jointly the three dimensions of the lobbying dynamic: strategies, access and influence. We test several hypotheses with evidence from an original and pioneer survey with interest groups and lobbyists from Chile. Our results show that cause-oriented lobbies are more likely to embrace indirect lobbying strategies. We also examined access. We found that lobbies declare that it is more effective to direct their persuasion efforts towards convincing legislators who are not yet decided. They do so instead of focusing either on the representatives that already agree with them, or enemies. On influence, our results show that most business groups assert that legislators prefer constituents’ input over theirs. Also, they perceive themselves as losing policy battles more often in comparison with other groups.