A Stronghold of Routine Corporatism? : The Involvement of Interest Groups in Policy Making in Finland

Peer reviewe

Representative bureaucracy and unconscious bias: Exploring the unconscious dimension of active representation

Representative bureaucracy theory explores the effects of representation on bureaucracies, but less attention has been paid to date as to how agents represent values or interests. Addressing this omission, this article highlights the unconscious dimension of active representation and, more specifically, the role of unconscious bias in representation. Unconscious bias has received limited attention to date in public administration, but has clear relevance for understanding how representation occurs at the individual level. This article proposes a framework for understanding unconscious bias. Drawing on Bourdieu's habitus, but making explicit its unconscious dimension, I argue that unconscious bias enhances our understanding of how active representation occurs in bureaucracies today. The article applies these insights to the case of unconscious gender bias as found in the Australian Public Service (APS) and concludes by exploring the methodological challenges involved in building a research agenda into tackling unconscious bias

The Varying Mechanisms of Media Access : Explaining Interest Groups' Media Visibility across Political Systems

A growing body of studies analyzes interest groups' media visibility. Yet little is known about how the drivers of media access may vary across different interest group systems. This article focuses on two major mechanisms through which organizations can gain media visibility: media management efforts and the newsworthiness of elite actors. We hypothesize that media effort explains interest groups' media access more strongly in competitive, pluralist interest group systems and that insider (i.e. "elite") status does so more strongly in hierarchical, corporatist systems. We analyze surveys and media data on interest groups in the pluralist United Kingdom, the moderately corporatist Denmark, and the more strongly corporatist Finland. As hypothesized, media effort is most effective in the UK and weakest in Finland. However, we find only weak support for the insider status hypothesis: there is some evidence of the expected cross-country differences, but the effects are small and unrobust.Peer reviewe

Diversity in the news? A study of interest groups in the media in the UK, Spain and Denmark

This paper provides the first systematic cross-country analysis of interest group appearances in the news media. The analysis included three countries - the UK, Spain and Denmark - each representing one of Hallin and Mancini's (2004) three overall models of media and politics: the liberal system, the polarized pluralist system and the democratic corporatist system. We find important similarities across countries with high levels of concentration in media coverage of groups, more extensive coverage of economic groups than citizen groups and differential patterns of group appearances across policy areas and between right-leaning and left-leaning papers. However, we also identify country variation, with the highest degree of concentration among group appearances in Spanish newspapers and most attention to economic groups in Danish newspapers

Transformations of Swiss Neo-Corporatism : From Pre-parliamentary Negotiations towards Privileged Pluralism in the Parliamentary Venue

Major economic peak-level associations, because of their various resources (in terms of membership, finance and institutional reconnaissance by public authorities) have be-come central political actors of the Swiss neo-corporatist regime. They were considered the dominant actors of the pre-parliamentary phase of the decision-making process (extra-parlia-mentary committees, consultation procedures), identified as the most important phase, whereas the Parliament only marginally modified the proposals of the Federal Council. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, the strategies of interest groups have profoundly changed, leading to a reconfiguration of the traditional neo-corporatist political regime toward a more pluralist system, in which interest groups more actively target the Parliament. Different factors explain these changes: the declining role of the pre-parliamentary phase, the revalorization of the Par-liament, and the increasing role of the media. These changes have weakened the positions of traditional corporatist associations and favored the political rise of new citizen groups. They have also induced interest groups to develop new political strategies, privileging the parliamen-tary venue, especially the new permanent specialized committees. Despite the growing access of new citizen groups to the political system (pre-parliamentary and parliamentary venues), economic groups remain dominant in the domains of economic and social policies