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The 3th Annual Summer School on Interest Group Politics will be hosted at Agder University, Kristiansand (Norway), July 17-26, 2012. This year’s focus is ‘influence’. Do interest groups affect the policies that are made within a given polity (the EU, international organizations and/or states)? How much influence do organizations, citizen groups, and/or other lobbyists have on policy outcomes? How are policy agenda’s formed and which roles to interest organizations play in this process? These questions are highly relevant, not only for empirical political science, but also for debates on democratic legitimacy. These normative implications are particularly significant at a time when governments, international organizations and academics aim to address a perceived democratic deficit by increasing political participation by groups. Would such a participatory engineering broaden the democratic input legitimacy or merely lead to increased influence by special interests?
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