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

拟议的研究项目调查有组织的利益集团分别与政党和媒体在形成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想法和议程，他们战略性地利用媒体影响党和政府的议程。我们认为，利益集团的媒体策略可以产生或减少动员偏见，而政府的能力有限，以响应所有社会利益导致议程偏见，由政党调解。该项目将调查德国的情况下，这些因果关系的索赔-一个社团主义的国家与多党制，政府适合分析在政治制度的社会需求的表达和聚合。基于最近进行的研究，作为跨国研究的一部分，联盟和利益集团（AIG），我们计划分析不同的中间机构，包括有组织的利益，媒体和政党之间的互动更密切。在AIG，我们通过对游说者进行的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，组织利益和政府的问题议程。分析这三个议程之间的一致性程度，我们发现公民和组织利益的议程之间的适度相关性。虽然我们没有发现富裕的公民和不富裕的公民之间有组织的利益代表的程度有差异，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，我们的研究结果支持Gilens和Page（2014）所称的“有偏见的多元化”，但不支持他们所谓的“经济精英统治”。 因此，通过有组织的利益集团向政策制定者传递公民的议题偏好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系统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提高对政党和媒体在有组织的利益代表方面的作用的认识。此外，收集和控制媒体议程的数据将使我们能够对自由民主中利益集团的代表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.