Interest Groups’ Participation in Online Consultations: Reducing Bias?

Online consultations, e.g. online discussions and online surveys, are increasingly used by public administrations to engage interest groups and citizens in policy making and to thus make it more inclusive. While previous research has focused on interest groups’ participation in EU level online consultations (e.g. Quittkat 2011; Bunea 2014; Rasmussen & Carroll 2014), we ask what determines groups’ participation in online consultations at a national level. More specifically, we study whether online consultations are “weapons of the weak” (cf. Van der Graaf et al. 2015) that may empower relatively weak interest groups. By using a survey design, we compare interest groups’ use of the online consultation strategy to administrative, parliamentary, media, and (bottom-up) social media strategies. Drawing inspiration from theories on interest groups’ social media strategies (Chalmers & Shotton 2015), we propose two alternative hypotheses. On one hand, the online consultation strategy, because of its low cost as well as open access to online consultations, might require less resources than many other strategies of influence. On the other hand, groups with bigger staff might be able to use online consultations more effectively and therefore participate in them more often than resource-poor groups. Moreover, more resourceful groups, which are often better connected with policy makers, might be better informed of opportunities to participate in online consultations. However, groups with insider status might perceive other inside strategies as more effective and therefore do not want to participate in online consultations. Our empirical analyses are based on a survey of Finnish interest groups (mostly associations) conducted from November 2015 to February 2016. Gathered from a wide variety of sources (cf. Christiansen 2012), our sample consisted of around 3370 groups and was intended to cover the whole population of nationwide interest groups in Finland. Around 1840 interest groups responded our survey, of which around 1470 stated that they are politically active and nationwide, and will be thus included in our analyses. We answer the research question by analyzing whether groups’ size of political staff, privileged position (cf. Binderkrantz 2005) and group type affect their use of the online consultation strategy. Moreover, we conduct similar analyses with regard to administrative, parliamentary and media strategies (see Binderkrantz 2005) as well as to (bottom-up) social media strategies (see Chalmers & Shotton 2015; Van der Graaf et al. 2015). This allows us to analyze whether the possible effect of our independent variables on the use of the online consultation strategy is similar or different to their effect on other strategies. Thus we can assess whether participation in online consultations is more or less biased than groups’ use of other strategies. We control for the scope of areas that groups are active in and the intensiveness of political influence as a goal (cf. Binderkrantz 2005). As the survey was just recently completed, we do not yet know the results at the moment of writing this abstract. Co-author: Mika Vehka (University of Helsinki)