Lobbying (A)symmetry: The Dynamics Behind Informed Policy (LOBBYMETRY)

Work package 1: Cross-country surveys among populations of interest organisations and policymakers

The first work package taps into expert perceptions of policy professionals. In a series of cross-country surveys, we invite representatives of interest organisations, other public affairs speciaists, as well as legislative and bureaucratic staff to share their account of the informational environment on issues they have worked on extensively. The aim is to understand which contexts and conditions are condusive for policy debates where different positions can be voiced freely, expert evidence is included, and misinformation minimised.

If you have been invited to take part in the survey and have any questions, please refer to our FAQ document or contact us directly at any time.

Work package 2: Quantitative textual analysis of issues in climate, digital and health politics

The second work package analyses issues in the areas of digital, climate and health policy. Based on automated text analysis, as well as manual coding, we assess the relationship between asymmetric mobilisation and information provision, including the use of scientific evidence in lobbying on issues where public interests are at stake in various ways.

Work package 3: Focus group interviews and ethnographic shadowing

In a third work package, we investigate how lobbyists and policymakers navigate information asymmetries by directly observing their interactions. It combines ethnographic shadowing of policymakers in real-world information-gathering with carefully designed focus groups on digital and climate policy.

Work package 4: Interventions to avoid policy capture

The final work package synthesises the findings across our data collection efforts to distil their normative and practical implications for improving consultation practices, informational flows and fact-checking, for instance in digital policy. By forming a board of civil society organisations and organising hybrid outreach events, we invite practitioners to help debate and reinterpret our results. These practitioner dialogues, alongside a generalisability probe of our policy area-specific findings, inform a book on the project’s findings about informational lobbying.

In case you work in this field and are interested in participating, please do not hesitate to contact us.

What is the study about?

The LOBBYMETRY project studies how interest organisations and companies inform political debates and policy decisions. We contact approximately 9,000 organisations across 11 countries and at EU-level, as well as staff members in public affairs companies to collect comparative data about the role that stakeholders play in informing the policy process for a diverse set of issues.

Who is conducting the study?

This study is conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, under the leadership of Associate Professor Wiebke Marie Junk (Principal Investigator (PI)). It is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) through a grant awarded to the Principal Investigator.

Why have I been invited to participate?

We are contacting staff members responsible for advocacy, public affairs or policy-related work in NGOs, business associations, trade unions, associations of professionals, companies and public affairs consultancies. In organisations, where no position exists for these tasks (or is not made public), we are contacting the chairperson, CEO or equivalent. You have been selected, because you have been identified as the best available contact within your organisation based on information accessed on organisations' websites and/or in lobby registers, complemented by other online sources. Names and contact information were collected and checked by the project's research assistants. Where appropriate, AI-tools were used to support this manual collection of publicly available data.

What does my participation entail?

The survey collects information about experiences with lobbying and information exchange on political issues participants have worked on recently, followed by hypothetical scenarios the participant is asked to evaluate. It takes approximately 20-30 minutes to complete the survey.

Participants can opt-in to receive a respondent report, summarizing trends in information environments across the studied countries (expected in fall/winter 2026).

How will data be processed?

Information about individual participants and organisations will be treated as confidential and stored without access by unauthorised persons. After completion of the survey, data is stored in pseudonymised form. An anonymised version of the data will eventually be made open access. Under no circumstances, will it be possible to trace the identity of participants or their organisations from the published data or results in project outputs.

For more information see the detailed participant information sheets below (available in the respective survey language), as well as the document Information about the Processing of Personal Data by the University of Copenhagen (in English).

Participant information sheets

• Participant information sheet (English)
• Informationsark til deltagere (Dansk)
• Informationsblatt für Teilnehmende (Deutsch)
• Dalyvio informacinis lapas (Iietuvių)
• Scheda informativa per i partecipanti (Italiano)
• Informatieblad voor deelnemers (Nederlands)
• Ficha de Informação do Participante (Português)
• Informationsblad för deltagare (Svenska)

Information about the Processing of Personal Data

• Information about the Processing of Personal Data by the University of Copenhagen (English)