Laila Sorurbakhsh, PhD (May 2012)
Dissertation Title: “Feedback in the EU Advocacy System”
Dissertation Committee: Jim Granato (chair), Jonathan Slapin, Eduardo Aleman, and Christine Mahoney (University of Virginia)
Laila's research focuses in interest group populations in the European Union, and how they've changed in terms of behavior and in number as a result of institutional, structural, and environmental changes in the EU. Specifically, Laila is interested in how vertical and horizontal expansion has affected interest group populations and how they lobby. Using the theoretical frameworks of both niche and coalition theory, Laila tests how interest group populations react to changes in the European Union in both policy and scope.
In her dissertation, Laila collected information on interest groups active in the European Union from the years 1993-2010, providing a much-needed time-component to the data already existing in the field. As a result, now studies of interest group populations over time can be conducted with reliable and current data.
The data has been updated to include active groups from 2010-2013, and can be found here in Stata format. Please use and cite Laila's 2013 article in European Political Science for an explanation on the information found in the dataset. For any additional questions or an extended codebook, please contact Laila directly at [email protected]
Currently, Laila is studying how interest groups formulate and respond to policies made under circumstances of imperfect information. With regards to environmental issues, many policies are made with a measure of scientific uncertainty, and as a result, feature built-in risks in terms of outcomes. In the European Union, biofuel policy has taken front and center for many environmental, transport, and energy groups, who may or may not have changed their policy stances in the last ten years since the advent of policy innovation. This project seeks to find how interest groups formulate policy stances under conditions of scientific uncertainty, how groups relay successes and failures to members, and how groups utilize lobbying coalitions to leverage both successes and failures.
Dissertation Title: “Feedback in the EU Advocacy System”
Dissertation Committee: Jim Granato (chair), Jonathan Slapin, Eduardo Aleman, and Christine Mahoney (University of Virginia)
Laila's research focuses in interest group populations in the European Union, and how they've changed in terms of behavior and in number as a result of institutional, structural, and environmental changes in the EU. Specifically, Laila is interested in how vertical and horizontal expansion has affected interest group populations and how they lobby. Using the theoretical frameworks of both niche and coalition theory, Laila tests how interest group populations react to changes in the European Union in both policy and scope.
In her dissertation, Laila collected information on interest groups active in the European Union from the years 1993-2010, providing a much-needed time-component to the data already existing in the field. As a result, now studies of interest group populations over time can be conducted with reliable and current data.
The data has been updated to include active groups from 2010-2013, and can be found here in Stata format. Please use and cite Laila's 2013 article in European Political Science for an explanation on the information found in the dataset. For any additional questions or an extended codebook, please contact Laila directly at [email protected]
Currently, Laila is studying how interest groups formulate and respond to policies made under circumstances of imperfect information. With regards to environmental issues, many policies are made with a measure of scientific uncertainty, and as a result, feature built-in risks in terms of outcomes. In the European Union, biofuel policy has taken front and center for many environmental, transport, and energy groups, who may or may not have changed their policy stances in the last ten years since the advent of policy innovation. This project seeks to find how interest groups formulate policy stances under conditions of scientific uncertainty, how groups relay successes and failures to members, and how groups utilize lobbying coalitions to leverage both successes and failures.
