The Effects of Crisis on Bias in Interest Representation

Bias in interest representation is usually seen as a persistent feature of policy-making.Yet, we do not know whether and how large-scale shocks to political agendas affect it. With COVID-19 as a case, we use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the effect of crisis on political access and Twitter activity among NGOs and business groups. We predict crisis to have differential effects on their prominence in the two lobbying channels due to differences in how incentivized and constrained these actors are with respect to using them. Our analysis of 11,967 groups from 120 countries registered in the European Union supports these expectations: Business interests increase their insider lobbying access relative to NGOs whereas the picture is reversed when analyzing social media activity. Moreover, little evidence indicates that differences in activities among groups are driven by resources. Our findings have important implications for understanding how crisis affects democratic governance and legitimacy.