Content area
Abstract
Title: All the World's a Stage. Interest Group Politics at WTO and UNFCCC Negotiation Conferences.
If we went back a decade we had rather distinct European and American literatures on lobbying and interest groups politics that did not really speak to each other. Over the course of the last ten years, nonetheless, much has changed. Increasingly, scholars in Europe and the US rely on a common theoretical toolbox that consists of a number of interconnecting, mostly mid-range, theories related to the different stages of the influence production process. This dissertation takes this development towards cumulative theory building a step further by applying an interest group perspective to explain transnational advocacy at WTO and UNFCCC negotiation rounds between 1995 and 2012. More specifically it explains mobilization trends, interest population dynamics and strategic choices of interest groups at these conferences based on a series of theoretical perspectives commonly used in the interest group literature. The results show that, although the context of transnational conferences remains an important factor to understand various aspects of transnational interest group politics, at the same time a great deal of commonalities exist between lobbying in a transnational context and lobbing in the US/EU. As such, this dissertation has proven the usefulness and necessity of using a common theoretical toolbox to explain and understand interest group politics across a wide variety of political systems.
