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

拟议的研究项目分别调查有组织的利益集团与政党和媒体在制定民主机构的政策议程方面的相互作用。有组织的利益集团与政党交换思想和议程，他们战略性地利用媒体来影响党和政府的议程。我们认为，利益集团的媒体战略可以产生或减少动员偏见，而政府响应所有社会利益的受限能力导致了由政党调解的议程偏见。该项目将调查德国案例中的这些因果关系主张--德国是一个社团主义国家，其多党、议会制的政府制度适合分析政治制度中社会需求的表达和聚合。在作为跨国研究议程和利益集团(AIG)的一部分进行的最新研究的基础上，我们计划更密切地分析不同中介机构之间的互动，包括有组织的利益集团、媒体和政党。在AIG，我们通过对游说者的200多次面对面和电话采访，对公民进行的两轮大规模电话调查，以及对2016年至2018年数百项立法法案和政府政策声明(Regierungserklärungen)的分析，绘制了公民、有组织的利益集团和政府的问题议程。分析这三个议程之间的一致程度，我们发现公民的议程和有组织的利益之间存在适度的相关性。虽然我们没有发现较富裕的公民和较不富裕的公民在有组织的利益代表程度上没有差异，但我们的分析表明，非商业团体比商业团体更能代表公众。因此，到目前为止，我们的发现支持吉伦斯和佩奇(2014)所说的“有偏见的多元化”，但不支持他们所说的“经济精英统治”。因此，通过有组织的利益集团将公民的问题偏好传递给政策制定者的逻辑似乎更加复杂。为了更好地理解偏见的来源，我们必须考虑通过政党或/和媒体展现的间接议程效应。要做到这一点，除了AIG已经编码的公众、利益集团和政府议程之外，我们还需要关于政党制度和媒体议程的可比数据。出于方法上的原因，我们还计划将我们的数据扩展到政府议程上。该项目的主要贡献将是加深对缔约方和媒体在有组织的利益代表方面的作用的认识。此外，收集有关媒体议程的数据并对其进行控制，将使我们能够对自由民主中利益集团的代表性功能做出更有力的推断。

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.