Lobbying government, parliament, and the media: The access of organized interests to political arenas in Germany

To influence public policy, organized interests can lobby in different arenas, understood as political institutions of importance for political decisions and/or the political agenda of a society (Binderkrantz et al. 2015), In our paper, we analyse the access of organized interests to three important arenas in national policy-making: executive and parliament as the two core political institutions in a parliamentary democracy as well as the news media, which is central for outside lobbying, the mobilization of the public to pressure policymakers. We focus on access of organized interest to these arenas, since access is a crucial intermediary step towards political influence, the ultimate goal of lobbying. Specifically, we ask whether access to these arenas is distinct or cumulates around resourceful groups, whether access in one arena spills over to another one, and to what extent the different arenas are biased towards certain interests. To answer these questions, we scrutinize how the different kinds of interest that actors represent and the resources they have at hand as well as the salience of the bills under discussion affect the probability of an actor’s arena access. Our theoretical framework encompasses different perspectives: While exchange-theoretical approaches assume that access to political arenas is determined by the kind of information groups can offer, resulting in business interest to be overrepresented in the government and public interests in media and parliament, other perspectives assume that resourceful groups dominate all arenas or focus on the conflict and salience of issues as explanatory variables. Our dataset encompasses 25 federal bills drafted in the year 2019 in Germany. For these bills, we measure access of interest groups and firms to the federal executive and the parliament by their participation in ministerial consultations and in public committee hearings. Access to the media is measured by the appearances of organized interest in the coverage of seven German newspapers on these bills. Based on this data, we run multivariate analyses of arena access with explanatory variables for group types, resources, and proposal salience. The results of our analysis shed light on whether (and to what extent) the representation of interests in the three arenas is biased, and contributes to ongoing debates on whether interest representation in Germany is (still) corporatist or rather pluralist.