Viral Lobbying: Strategies, Access and Influence during the COVID-19 Pandemic

‘Viral lobbying’, that is, interest group politics during the COVID-19 pandemic, is both an important case in itself, as well as an insightful context to study the dynamics of how organised interests impact policy responses after an external shock and in radically altered circumstances. Pandemic politics in the COVID-19 crisis can be seen as a system-wide focusing event (Sabatier 1988; Kingdon 1995; Birkland 1998), which requires immediate and far-reaching responses by all political actors. Our analyses cover several relevant analytical levels to understand ‘viral lobbying’. From an organisational perspective, it is important to address how individual interest organisations adapted to the challenges posed by the global health crisis. At the same time, it is important to study, at the system-level, whether the political and interest group system is resilient to the massive disruptions posed by the pandemic. Finally, at both the organisation and system-level, a crucial question is how the resulting patterns in actual policy influence are distributed – for instance between types of organisations (economic and non-economic groups) and different sectors. To answer such pivotal questions, we trace the influence production process, which analyses interest group mobilisation, strategies and interactions with policymakers to link them to impact on policy outcomes (Lowery and Gray 2004; Mahoney 2008; Baumgartner et al. 2009; Dür and Mateo, 2016). In particular, our emphasis is on the advocacy stages of mobilisation, strategy selection, access and influence. We rely on data collected in two survey waves in seven European polities from more than 1,600 interest groups. More specifically, starting with the analysis of mobilisation patterns, we differentiate between organisations who mobilised after the outbreak of COVID-19 and those who, instead, were not able to do so because of the disruption caused by the pandemic. Among those who mobilised politically, we explore which strategies were selected and how organisations adapted their strategies to the new circumstances. Subsequently, we link the use of strategies to their political effects. We do this, firstly, by analysing patterns in political access, that is, the organisations’ interactions with political actors in key venues of policymaking. Secondly, we assess to which extent lobbying during the pandemic plausibly influenced the resulting public policies by focussing on differences between more and less influential organisations. In this way, we aim to evaluate the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for lobbying communities in Europe, by attending to the above stages of the influence production process applied to lobbying on COVID-19 related policies.