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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.

Interest groups pursue a wide range of policy goals. In their attempts to realize these goals, groups may lobby bureaucrats and politicians, approach the media and engage in protest activities. This article investigates the relation between the characteristics of policy goals and the strategies of influence utilized by interest groups. Policy goals are captured by four dimensions emphasizing: (i) the divisibility of goals, (ii) the degree of change sought, (iii) the type of interests pursued, and (iv) how technical goals are. The relevance of these dimensions and the effect of goals on influence strategies are tested in a survey of national Danish interest groups. The findings support the importance of group goals as determining strategy. Groups pursuing general interests mainly lobby parliament and the media, whereas groups with technically complicated goals lobby bureaucrats more intensively. The more divisible a goal a group is pursuing, the more actively it engages in all types of influence strategies.