Online Networks of Challengers in Food Policy: A Comparative Study of Structures and Coalitions in Germany, UK, US and Switzerland

While there is no doubt about the significance of food safety issues, apart from scandals and symbolic politics, the policies of food regulation have been less present in public sphere. However, if we take into account how directly food issues are related to public health, then questions of food safety are concrete and have great immediacy. In our study we assume that the latency of the food safety issue renders it an ideal case to study the communication network and the coalition structure of food safety critics and their protest movement potential under different conditions. Eventually we aim to describe and explain challenger networks in the field of food safety in the UK, the US, Germany and Switzerland. In our study we ask (1) how do food protest actors networks look like, who are the dominant actors, how does the structure of the networks look like and how the actors are linked together. (2) How do issue networks in the food sector vary across the four countries under study? We focus on issue networks on the Internet and assume that if they are strong enough and build on a dense structure linked with other protest movements, the communication may provoke a politicization of the food safety issue. The selected countries represent different constraints of policy making and public debate. We take Germany and Switzerland as examples of corporatist systems while the UK and the US in contrast stand for pluralist systems Our findings are based on webcrawls with the Issuecrawler, a hyperlink crawling software.