Introduction

Can public interest groups exert substantial influence in policy areas? Yes, they can. Any policy expert, business representative or journalist will state that public interest groups have gained much political clout since the 1990s. Public interest groups generally represent broad interests, often acting on behalf of the environment, taxpayers or consumers; such groups previously lacked the incentive and capacities for self-organisation.

‘Going public’ is a widely used strategy to compensate for a lack of resources or membership base, yet this strategy often involves in-depth analysis of policies. How are German public interest groups able to gather information, knowledge and skills to grasp respective policies and to develop strategies? And how are they able to make up for the huge capacities that government agencies, political parties and special interest groups have built up in Germany?

Public interest groups in Germany have a more obscure reputation compared to trade unions, employers’ associations or other well-established special interest groups (Sebaldt and Straßner, 2004). Traditionally, public interests have been dealt with by state and government agencies, with parties and pressure groups in charge of representing special interests. It was not until civil courts opened up to citizens’ claims against companies during the 1970s that enforcing public interests became a public interest group business.

This is why this chapter picks environmental policy as one example. It shows the growing capacities for policy analysis in the hands of public interest groups. Following the role model of special interest groups, German environmental groups have managed to create their own turf, to ‘capture’ agencies and to establish close relations with mass media.

The example of consumer policy is different, by contrast, with capacities for policy analysis still limited because of a murky political environment. German consumer organisations do not feature stable government relations because issues are cross-cutting, and they do not have a strong membership base because government substantially funds them. However, both environmental and consumer groups have increasingly relied on policy analysis, and creating and championing policy instruments is one of their common endeavours. Does policy analysis help?

This chapter aims to show how public interest groups use policy analysis, how they create policy knowledge on their own and how they feed policy analysis to politics. The main argument holds that public interest groups rely on a mix of policy evidence and public framing that serves their needs. Yet German political science and other disciplines provide a form of policy analysis that rarely meets these needs.