Interest Groups and the Media: The Influence of Group Characteristics on the Perceived Importance of Targets of Communication

Interest groups interact with their environment to communicate their points of view and to achieve certain goals. Yet communication consumes valuable resources, hence interest groups have to decide which audiences to target with their communication and how to allocate scarce resources. Adopting a political economy view, we assume that the organizations we study behave as rational actors and allocate the funds earmarked for communication in a way which maximizes the intended impacts. Recipients of communication perceived as more important are therefore expected to be targeted more often. In this article, we study what determines this perception of importance of four target groups for Swiss interest groups: parties and the government, the media, the general public, the organizations' own members. More specifically, we examine how interest group characteristics influence the perceived importance of these target audiences. Examples of such characteristics for which we derive hypotheses are the sectors of activity of interest groups, the organizations' size both in terms of membership and employees, the overall annual budget and the fraction thereof earmarked for communications, the regularity with which media, opinion leaders, and the public opinion are monitored, etc. To investigate the validity of the various hypotheses, a dataset derived from a survey among all politically active Swiss interest groups is used (response rate 40%). Cluster analysis reveals that the communication behaviour of interest groups can broadly be categorised into four classes. For further analysis we rely on ordered logit models to test which interest group characteristics influence the perceived importance of the four identified target audiences.