Studying honest answers to sensitive issues in politics <i>New evidence on lobbying influence</i>

Abstract Studying lobbying influence in politics has been confronted with the challenge of gaining insights into processes that usually take place behind closed doors and about which honest answers from participants are difficult to obtain. Therefore, innovative methods of indirect measurement of lobby success – via text analysis or interviews – have been used to get at the hidden politics of lobbying. In this research note, we propose an additional technique to study lobby influence much more directly, the randomized response technique (RRT). This method has been successfully used to study doping in elite sports, for instance, but has been almost absent from political research in the past. The note presents the method and illustrates its applicability with a study of lobby influence in German Parliaments. The study reached out to 2386 present and to 850 former MPs (Members of Parliaments). The response dataset added up to 273 present and 160 former MPs, equaling response rates of 11.4% and 18.8% respectively. Despite these low response rates, it was nevertheless possible to estimate rates of lobby-friendly behavior among German MPs at comparably low rates of instruction noncompliance. Although the results should be interpreted cautiously due to the low response rate, the study demonstrates the viability of RRT surveys as a means to study sensitive issues in politics.