Media Strategies of Public Interest Groups: A Threat to Corporatist Bargaining? Evidence from the Swiss Case

Public interest groups (IGs) are said to display a stronger preference for the media arena than business IGs. This translates into a relatively stronger presence of public IGs within the media arena, as compared to the insider venues, administration and parliament. This is commonly explained as the consequence of public IGs possessing more so-called “outsider” resources, that is, they can claim to represent the public interest. Several authors further claim that public IGs seek out the media arena in order to demonstrate activity to their diffuse membership. By contrast, business IGs, in particular corporatist IGs, enjoy privileged integration into public decision-making due to their ability to effectively halt the economy and their superior capacity to produce technical information of use to bureaucrats and MPs. This contribution challenges the view that the adoption of media strategies allows public IGs to compensate for their relatively weaker presence within the insider venues. It suggests that their relatively stronger presence within the media arena, documented by some recent studies, merely represents the mirror image of their relatively weaker presence within the insider venues. In short, neither the lack of outsider resources nor the absence of the incentive to recruit members explains business IGs’ relatively weaker presence within the media. Business IGs will react to the pressure exerted by public IGs within media if popular opinion becomes a threat to corporatist bargaining. In order to test this claim, we will analyze and compare the presence of different types of IGs within administration, parliament and media. This will be done on the basis of a selection of recent important policy issues in Switzerland. The Swiss context is particularly suitable for such an analysis, as media presence remains the only available strategy in the run-up to a direct democratic vote.