Department of Political Science

Studies of the political role of interest groups rely on mapping their presence in politics. This article presents the INTERARENA research project which mapped interest group access to the administration, parliament and the news media across several countries. The project departed from a definition of access that emphasized the role of gatekeepers in different political arenas. The article discusses the ambitions of the research project and the subsequent choice of empirical indicators for political access. In addition, it presents the data sources used and provides an overview of the data collected. The described datasets are available online for other researchers interested in empirical mapping of group access to politics.