New media and old politics: How social media advocacy varies across political systems

This paper examines how interest groups use social media as a weapon of advocacy to pressure or please their government. On the one hand, social media constitute an ideal forum for outsiders to pressure policy officials while reaching out to a wider audience of citizens, journalists and supporters. On the other hand, these social media are embedded in longstanding institutional systems which prescribe particular patterns of advocacy behavior. This paper argues that the way in which interest groups position themselves on social media is driven by the political system in which they operate. Interest groups in neo-corporatists systems are expected to be more consensus-oriented, i.e. relatively cooperative and approving of their government’s policies. Conversely, interest groups in pluralist settings are hypothesized to be more antagonistic and prone to criticize their government’s policies on social media. To test these expectations the paper studies the advocacy efforts of the hospitality industry on Twitter in six Western democracies for the curious case of COVID-19. Our preliminary findings underscore the importance of institutional path dependency, while challenging the image of social media lobbying as an outsider’s strategy.