Diversity in the News? A Study of Interest Groups in the Media in the UK, Spain and Denmark

Abstract

This paper provides the first systematic cross-country analysis of interest group appearances in the news media. The analysis included three countries -the UK, Spain and Denmark -each representing one of Hallin and Mancini's (2004) three overall models of media and politics: the liberal system, the polarized pluralist system and the democratic corporatist system. We find important similarities across countries with high levels of concentration in media coverage of groups, more extensive coverage of economic groups than citizen groups and differential patterns of group appearances across policy areas and between right-leaning and left-leaning papers. However, we also identify country variation, with the highest degree of concentration among group appearances in Spanish newspapers and most attention to economic groups in Danish newspapers.3

Representation beyond people: Lobbying access of umbrella associations to legislatures and the media

“…The existing literature on lobbying access has highlighted the importance of institutional variation and gatekeeper preferences for inside access (Beyers, 2004;Braun, 2012;Eising, 2007), country variation regarding the concentration in outside access (Binderkrantz, Bonafont, & Halpin, 2016), as well as variation in access depending on the policy areas or issues at stake (Binderkrantz, 2012;Binderkrantz, Bonafont, et al, 2016;Rasmussen & Gross, 2015). At the interest group level, research has focused on the effect of group type, pointing to differences in access between economic and public interests (Beyers, 2004;Binderkrantz, Bonafont, et al, 2016;Binderkrantz et al, 2015;Boehmke et al, 2013;Eising, 2007;Halpin et al, 2012;Rasmussen & Gross, 2015). Relatedly, studies have emphasized the importance of resources for securing access, including informational resources (Chalmers, 2013;De Bruycker, 2016;Tallberg et al, 2015), financial resources (Eising, 2007;Fraussen et al, 2015;Rasmussen & Gross, 2015), and support resources in form of the size of individual membership (Fraussen et al, 2015;Fraussen & Beyers, 2016).…”

“…These main findings on a positive effect of umbrella structures on legislative access and a negative effect in the media arena are robust to changes in model specification. They hold using fixed effects instead of random intercepts for issues (Supporting Information Appendix Binderkrantz, Bonafont, et al, 2016) of umbrellas. Testing effects in a split sample gives preliminary support for potential country differences regarding legislative access.…”

Interest group representation and framing in the media: A policy area perspective

“…The empirical analysis draws on a content analysis of interest group appearances in the Danish news media. Previous work has found variation in group coverage across newspapers of different political leaning (Binderkrantz et al, ), and the study therefore includes two papers of different political leaning: Jyllands‐Posten and Politiken. Both papers are independent of political parties, but in terms of content and readership, Jyllands‐Posten is right‐leaning, and Politiken left‐leaning on the traditional left–right dimension in politics.…”

“…The empirical analysis draws on a content analysis of interest group appearances in the Danish news media. Previous work has found variation in group coverage across newspapers of different political leaning (Binderkrantz et al, 2017), and the study therefore includes two papers of different political leaning: Jyllands-Posten and Politiken.…”

“…Organized interests serve as transmission belts for citizen views into public debates and the political system. In effect, much attention has focused on the diversity in the range of voices represented by interest groups (Binderkrantz, Chaqués-Bonafont, & Halpin, 2017;Schattschneider, 1975;Schlozman, Verba, & Brady, 2012;Thrall, 2006). More recently, scholars have pointed to the importance of the way groups frame their arguments in public debates-do they emphasize the interests of their own membership or try to legitimate their views by highlighting broader societal concerns (Binderkrantz, 2019;Boräng & Naurin, 2015;Klüver, Mahoney, & Opper, 2015)?…”