’If a Fight Starts, Watch the Crowd’: Business Bias and the Expansion of Conflict

It is often assumed that when the scope of policy conflict increases, and more interest groups become involved on a particular issue, bias towards business interest organizations becomes lower. As noted by Schattschneider (1960, 40) ‘it is the weak who want to socialize conflict’ and therefore NGO’s, presumably unfavorably positioned in relation to the status-quo, would like to see ‘more and more people in the conflict until the balance of forces is changed.’ As a result, politically ‘weaker’ citizen groups will be in a more favorable position on broadly scoped issues compared to issues contained in narrow policy circles in which the ‘balance of forces’ is more likely to favor business interests (Baumgartner and Leech 2001). In this paper we qualify this argument and note that current studies often conflate the (public) salience and the scope of an issue. Salience refers to the public and media attention an issue receives whereas the scope refers to the number of policy participants involved in the issue. This implies that variation in either scope or salience leads distinct parts of the policy ‘audience’ to be drawn into or kept out of the policy fight. Saliency attracts broader, citizen interests and, for various theoretical reasons and as shown empirically, it reduces business bias (e.g. Dur and Mateo 2014). Whether the scope of conflict reduces bias depends on the composition of the pre-existing population of potential policy participants, the organized audience. In most cases, and certainly the EU, the ‘pool’ of potentially active groups is much larger on the business side, than on the NGO side. As a result, if more ‘manpower’ is needed in political conflicts, business can more easily and swiftly organize political action than the NGO community can. We therefore hypothesize that, contrary to existing wisdom, business bias is relatively low on narrowly scoped issues. We examine our hypotheses on two datasets. First, we rely on the InterEuro dataset which provides us population level data on a set of random issues. Next, we analyze all contacts of interest groups with EC officials which provide us with such data over time. In both instances, we find the same patterns. Once the scope of a conflict expands, business bias increases. Yet, once an issue becomes more salient, business bias reduces.