Dr Heike Klver awarded funding for Citizens, Interest Groups and Legislative Activity project

A British Academy small research grant has been awarded to Dr Heike Klver for her project Citizens, interest groups and legislative activity: A longitudinal study of interest representation. The award will run from 1 September 2011 to 31 August 2012.

Dr Klver will conduct a longitudinal study drawing on the lobbying register of the German Bundestag, in order to study the interest group population from 1973 to 2010. By combining this unique data source with legislative activity data from the Bundestag and data on citizen interests from the Socioeconomic Panel, she plans to determine the direction of the relationship between citizens, interest groups and governmental activity and to thereby shed light on the role of organized interests in democratic politics.