Pressure or power resource? The mediated public in political and economic bargaining
Final Report Abstract
In democratic societies, negotiations are an essential mechanism for finding solutions for social conflicts. However, most negotiations take place behind closed doors. Therefore, media and the public were said to be of marginal importance in these instances of societal decision-making. However, doubts seemed to be justified: Negotiators are high-ranking actors from the social elite who decide on issues with far-reaching social relevance. Moreover, these negotiations may gain momentum escalating into protests or strikes. For these reasons, decision-makers must take the media and the public into account, and sometimes they even try to instrumentalize them for their own purposes. Against this background, the goal was to examine the role of media and the public in negotiation-based decision-making processes between societal elites. The first step was to review the extensive body of literature from a variety of disciplines, such as communication research and social psychological negotiation research, to cast the central parameters into a comprehensive model. Major achievements of this modeling are, for example, that both spheres of action – the mediated public sphere and the closed negotiation space – are conceptualized in interaction. In addition, indirect channels of influence were explicitly taken into account. In a second step, the complex model with a large number of parameters had to be enriched and condensed to its core components. For this purpose, 90-minute expert interviews were conducted with 33 high-ranking negotiators and PR managers from the field of collective bargaining. The focus was on collective bargaining because it is an ideal-typical area of social conflict resolution in the form of negotiations. The interviewees from key sectors such as the metal and electrical industries, air transport, railroads and finance, hospitals and the public sector provided unique insights into how they perceive the media in connection with their negotiations and what role they play behind closed doors. Above all, it became clear that media coverage is an important gauge of what resonates with their own members. For this reason, public support for one side is also perceived as a tailwind behind closed doors. Finally, a large-scale survey of high-ranking negotiators (N = 326) who sat at the bargaining table of a trade dispute as a representative of trade unions, employers' associations or companies achieved to shed light onto how public communication is compatible with a cooperative bargaining strategy or how a potential escalation spiral toward a competitive strategy can arise. As a result, it was possible to survey an exclusive population – high-ranking decision-makers in collective bargaining – on a sensitive topic, namely their strategic considerations behind closed negotiating doors, and thus to achieve unique insights into the often subtle and indirect, but no less pervasive, influences of the media and the public in these decision-making processes.
Publications
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Media in Negotiations: Pressure or Power Resource? Conceptualizing Mediatization in the Core of Societal Decision Making. Full Paper(peer-reviewed) presented at the 69th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association.
Köhler, Christina, Weber, Mathias & Oliver Quiring
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Korsett und Machtressource. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.
Viehmann, Christina
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Unfolding a mediatized decision-making strategy – How decision-makers evaluate political news coverage and the consequences for their strategic actions. Full Paper(peer-reviewed) accepted for the 73rd Annual Conference of the International Communication Association.
Schaaf, M., Viehmann, C., Weber, M. & Quiring, O.
