Abstract
The negotiations on the terms of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union posed a myriad of potential political, social, and economic consequences for Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK with a land border with another Member State. Within these negotiations, interest groups in Northern Ireland mobilised extensively to lobby policymakers across jurisdictions and played an outsized role in the negotiations relative to their size.This thesis employs a process tracing methodology to assess the influence of interest groups in Northern Ireland against a hypothesised causal mechanism of influence production. In doing so, it draws upon forty-one semi-structured élite interviews and a unique dataset of documents related to the negotiations. This research identifies the interrelations between different stages of the influence production mechanism, offering insights into the processes that shape interest group actions and influence.
The empirical analysis of the UK withdrawal negotiations demonstrates that interest groups wielded influence over the outcome of the negotiations by influencing the content of the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration through the provision of exchange resources to policymakers with aligned objectives. This logic of legislative subsidy reveals an ideational perspective to the demand-side of interest group influence and challenges the prevailing rational choice and relational approaches. This influence was contingent on possessing favourable internal characteristics, the institutional context, and factors related to the issues under consideration. These initial findings are explored further in two in-depth case studies of the trade in goods and rights and equality protections. The case studies reveal a difference in how interest groups and policymakers perceive affectedness on issues which may have tangible effects.
This thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of interest group influence in policymaking processes including multi-level negotiations. It adds to the literature on interest groups in Northern Ireland and in the UK’s process of withdrawal from the EU and how interest groups strategically exploit multi-level opportunity structures to project influence beyond their regional geographic scope. The logic of legislative subsidy contributes an ideational rationale to the exchange theory of interest group influence and is shown to be applicable to the bureaucracy and executive in addition to the parliament. The findings of this thesis, uncovered through in-depth qualitative inquiry, provide a rich seam of future research in interest group studies.
Thesis is embargoed until 31 December 2029.
| Date of Award | Dec 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Sponsors | UK ESRC NINE Doctoral Training Partnership |
| Supervisor | David Phinnemore (Supervisor) & Lee McGowan (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- Northern Ireland
- Brexit
- influence
- interest groups
- business associations
- Trade Unions
- citizen groups
- professional associations
- civil society
- European Union
- legislative subsidy
- policymaking