Mobilization, involvement and influence of one interest group often fundamentally depends on mobilization, involvement and influence of other groups. Such interconnections become most obvious when groups concretely collaborate and jointly stage campaigns in larger coalitions. But often, collaboration is neither obvious nor explicit. For instance in the case of a successful movement campaign, groups may decide to participate without ever having direct connections with other involved groups. The simple fact that they raise their claims in the context of an ongoing protest campaign greatly increases their chances to get attention and to become influential. Besides such effects related to issue attention cycles, social movement scholars frequently observe radical flank effects, i.e. more moderate groups get media attention or access to decision makers due to protests staged by more radical groups. Interconnections between different interest groups are further relevant in relation to counter-campaigns or concurring campaigns.
The proposed paper advances the issue from a methodological point of view. How can these dependencies of interest groups on each other in public issue campaigns be captured? Especially, when the focus is on the strength and impact of interest groups in public debates, as measured for instance in media content analysis, the neglect of interdependencies may lead to over- or undervaluation of the relevance of different groups. Drawing on experiences from a larger research project on the impact of anti-globalization protests based on Political Claims Analysis (PCA), the paper discusses the problems and possible solutions.
