This article focuses on how the 20 main Italian interest groups evaluated the contents of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). In comparing its two versions (Conte Draft and Draghi Plan), we want to understand whether the change of government impacted on the contents of the NRRP and, in turn, on interest groups' preference attainment. To do so, we coded around 800 public statements following a multi-media approach. Interest groups' general appraisal for the NRRP grew with the change of government, while business groups greatly increased their degree of preference attainment. This within-case longitudinal comparison assesses the importance of governments' partisan composition to account for interest groups' success in the policymaking.

One of the major political narratives in the build-up to the critical parliamentary election of 2010 in Hungary was related to the “government of bankers.” Pre-2010 governments earned this label by the opposition based on their supposed close relationship with banking interests and for purportedly formulating financial and tax policy according to the needs of major financial institutions. In this article, we examine the preference attainment of the Hungarian Banking Association, the pre-eminent interest group in banking, and that of OTP, the biggest bank in Hungary, in order to evaluate this popular claim. The article addresses this challenge by comparing the policy influence of Hungarian Banking Association and OTP in the government cycles ending and starting in 2010. We adopt a computer-assisted qualitative content analysis framework and juxtapose the policy positions of the interest group in their formal communications with actual legislation related to the same issues. Results show that the general preference attainment of the banking lobby on major policy issues decreased after 2010—nevertheless, seismic activity was already under way after 2006.