With a Little Help from Our Party Friends? Examining the Association between News Coverage of Interest Groups and Organizational Ties to Parties

Getting media attention is an important strategy for interest groups when seeking to gain traction for their views among political decision makers and the public at large. Media attention is scarce, however, and previous research shows that this attention tends to be directed toward groups with more organizational resources, yet also to depend on issue-level characteristics. We build on this and argue that interest groups are more likely to succeed when they have (stronger) organizational ties to political parties. Such ties facilitate collaboration between the actors on specific issues, allow for coordination of media strategies, and enable the actors to draw on each other’s media networks. We examine the relationship empirically across four European democracies (Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK) at the general level and level of policy areas. We test our hypotheses using survey data on party-group ties and data on group and party presence in the news across 12 different newspapers from 2016-2018. Our results speak to research on interest group strategies, the effects of party-interest group relations on democracy, and bias in media attention.