Business groups beyond quiet politics: going public, while keeping covert!

Business groups promote private and material interests. As convincingly argued by Culpepper, business groups clearly benefit when politics remain “quiet” (i.e. in case of low issue salience and informal venues). Business groups can use their expertise and privileged access to administrative and political actors to control issue framing and policy processes. By contrast, business groups lose their advantage and policy influence when politics are “noisy” (i.e. in case of high issue salience and open debates in formal institutions). Business groups are challenged when they have to explain their self-interested policy positions in the media or in mediatized venues such as Parliament. However, one strategic option for business groups involved in noisy politics is to be present in the media, but in a covert way: they defend their sectorial interest not through their official speaker or president/leader, but through the MPs with whom they previously developed tight ties. As a matter of fact, MPs who have strong ties with interest groups need to be present in the media: firstly, the mediatization of politics demands media presence (i.e. reelection calculus, competition within the party and across parties, etc.); secondly, MPs have to demonstrate activity in order to satisfy their members. To test this basic idea, the present study will focus on media reports about policy processes in Switzerland. It will compare how frequently interest groups appear in the media, either in a direct/open way (i.e. as interest groups) or in an indirect/covert way (i.e. through MPs with ties to the interest group), and test three hypotheses: 1) Business groups are more frequently present in the media in an indirect/covert way than in direct/open way; 2) Public interest groups are more frequently present in the media in a direct/open way than in an indirect/covert way; 3) Overall, business groups have a higher media presence than public interest groups. We test these hypotheses based on two different datasets covering the 1999-2003 legislature in Switzerland: an extensive content analysis of actors’ presence in the media, as well as a dataset on MPs’ ties with interest groups.