Interest Groups’ Recruitment of Incumbent Parliamentarians to Their Boards

Abstract

Interest groups (IGs) recruit incumbent parliamentarians to their boards to influence policy, improve their resources and signal political connectedness. To detect parliamentarians’ characteristics that drive recruitment, this study analyses three decades of annual data (1985–2016) of 903 Swiss parliamentarians and their board seats. It compares 5249 cases of parliamentarians’ successful recruitment by 3291 different organisations to counterfactual cases where no recruitment took place. The results show that IGs recruit parliamentarians for both knowledge and networks (professions, other board seats) and influence (committee seats) in IGs’ policy areas. Moreover, recruited parliamentarians are more likely newcomers, ideologically proximate to IGs, moderate and from the same district as them.