Darren Halpin

Professor of Political Science
The Australian National University

I research and write about organised interests in politics (interest groups, thinks tanks, corporations and lobbyists) and political representation, and the connections between the two.

Bio

Darren Halpin is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. He researches and writes about the organisation of interests and interest representation in the policy process, in Australia, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and comparatively. His work has attracted competitive funding from bodies including the Australian Research Council, UK Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. Halpin is Founding Editor of the book series Interest Groups, Advocacy and Democracy published with Palgrave, UK.

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Publications

Books

Book chapters

Latest journal articles

Current research projects

Corporate Elites and US Politics

For the past four years, Anthony J. Nownes (University of Tennessee) and I have been working on a project to examine the role of the founders and CEOs of Silicon Valley firms in US politics. The New Entrepreneurial Advocacy: Silicon Valley Elites in American Politics, is out with Oxford University Press. It provides a deep dive into the political engagement of this important slice of corporate America.

Public Interest Advocacy

Max Groemping (Griffith University) and I have a Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant (DP220100050) to investigate the use of public interest frames by organised interests, and how such frames are (or are not) reproduced by the media and by political elites. Initial work utilises computational text-as-data methods to interrogate large text-based data sets on organised interest policy ‘asks’, the media coverage of policy asks, and the legislative debates around those asks. In addition, we will undertake experiments to explore the way elites detect and interpret public interest framing by advocates. We have a fabulous post-doc on board, Anne Sofie Cornelius Nielsen.  

Donations, interests and influence in Australian politics

Shaun Ratcliff (University of Sydney) and I are engaged in a project to document political donations to Australian political parties. Unprecedented attention is being paid to the size of donations – directly or via associated entities – to political parties, and their influence on the decisions made by elected officials. There is ever present discussion of ‘dark money’, ‘pay for play’ politics and donations for access and influence. The media consistently run stories outlining single instances where donations one day seem to run into advantageous government decisions the next. These ‘gotcha’ moments are undoubtedly important for the public record, but they also have an eroding effect on public trust in government.

We are completing an onerous process of (consistently) collating and coding all Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) political donations data since records were first kept (in 1998), including direct donations, and those via associated entities. We are currently working on two journal manuscripts using these data: one focuses on the relationships between organised interests and parties, while the other examines corporate donations.

Crowdsourcing Political Engagement

Ariadne Vromen (Australian National University) and I recently completed our ARC funded project examining the transformation of political activism and citizen-led campaigning in the digital age in Australia. The project focused on how crowdsourced forms of political engagement are facilitated by digital tools that let citizens share political information and calls to action. In particular it identified the extent and character of crowdsourcing e-tactics: petitioning, boycotting, buycotting, and micro-donations. A book – Crowdsourced Politics – the major output from this project, was recently published with Palgrave.

Data

Teaching and supervision

Engagement