This article discusses web collection of interest group statements on bills as a data source. Written statements allow the identification of actors active in policy-making as well as those actors’ positions, lobbying coalitions and issue saliency. These data also can contribute to the measurement of interest groups’ influence on legislation. Taking web collection from the German parliament’s and ministries’ web pages as an example, we demonstrate the collection process and the merits and limitations of employing written statements as identificatory data. Our analysis of statements submitted by interest groups, private firms and policy experts to four federal ministries and the respective parliamentary committees in the years 2015 and 2016 reveals differences between parliamentary and ministerial consultations. Although ministries have invited written statements for fewer draft laws than parliamentary committees, they received far more statements from interest groups. The reason is that German ministries often issue open calls, in which all actors are given the opportunity to comment on legislation, whereas the German parliament invites selected interest group representatives and other experts. As a further result, ministries are mostly contacted by business groups, whereas parliamentary committees use their gatekeeper function to balance interests.

This contribution scrutinises how introducing a statutory minimum wage of EUR 8.50 per hour on January 1, 2015, impacted German employees’ decision towards a union membership. Based on representative data from the ‘Panel Labour Market and Social Security’, we apply a logistic difference-in-differences propensity score matching approach on entries in and withdrawals from unions in the German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB). Our results show no separate effect on withdrawals from or entries in unions by the minimum wage introduction for those employees who benefited financially from it, but a significant increase of entries overall. Thus, unions’ campaign for a minimum wage strengthened their position in total but did not reverse the segmentation of union membership patterns.