Agendas and Interest Groups in Germany: The mediating role of parties and the media

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Patrick Bernhagen
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278877519

The proposed research project investigates the interaction between organized interests with political parties and the media, respectively, in shaping the policy agenda of democratic institutions. Organized interests exchange ideas and agendas with political parties, and they use the media strategically to influence both the party and the governmental agenda. We argue that interest groups’ media strategies can produce or reduce a mobilization bias, while the restrained capacity of governments to be responsive to all societal interests leads to an agenda bias, mediated by political parties. The project will investigate these causal claims for the case of Germany – a corporatist country with a multi-party, parliamentarian system of government suitable for analyzing the articulation and aggregation of societal demands in the political system. Building on recent research carried out as part of the cross-national study Agendas and Interest Groups (AIG), we plan to analyze the interaction between different intermediate institutions, including organized interests, the media, and political parties more closely. In AIG, we mapped the issue agendas of citizens, organized interests, and the government using over 200 face-to-face and telephone interviews with lobbyists, a two-round mass telephone survey of citizens, and analyses of hundreds of legislative bills and government policy statements (Regierungserklärungen) for the years 2016 to 2018. Analyzing the degree of congruence between these three agendas, we have found moderate correlations between the agendas of citizens and organized interests. While we have found no differences in the degree of representation by organized interests between more affluent citizens and their less wealthy counterparts, our analysis suggests that non-business groups represent the public better than business groups. Thus, our findings so far provide support for what Gilens and Page (2014) termed “biased pluralism” but not for what they called “economic-elite domination”. Thus, the logic of transmitting citizens’ issue preferences to policy-makers via organized interests seems to be more complex.In order to improve our understanding of the sources of bias, we have to consider indirect agenda effects that unfold via parties or/and the media. To do so, we require comparable data on the party-system and the media agendas in addition to the public, interest group and governmental agendas already coded by AIG. For methodological reasons, we also plan to extend our data on the government agenda. The project’s main contribution will be an increased understanding of the roles of parties and the media in the context of organized interest representation. In addition, collecting data on and controlling for the media agenda will enable us to arrive at more robust inferences about the representational function of interest groups in liberal democracy.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants