Media-induced change in political organizations? Interest groups and their reaction to the media

Abstract

The growing importance of the media, as suggested by the concept of “mediatization”, supposedly affects the “playing field” on which political organisations are active. From a neo-institutionalist perspective, we claim that the media can be perceived as constituting one part of the institutional environment of civil society organisations (CSOs) and interest groups. We operationalize structural changes in the organisations as changes in either rules applicable to communication practices or resources dedicated to communication. These reactions in the form of structural changes within the organisations, which can be attributed to the hypothesized growing influence of the media, are labelled “mediatization”. In our research project, we look at CSOs and interest groups in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Here, we present first empirical results, based on the analysis of the Swiss dataset. We discuss which communication instruments are implemented by which interest groups in their external communication (i.e. to policy-makers, to journalists or the public), their internal communication (to their members and supporters) and in monitoring their external environments. Data on how CSOs and interest groups evaluate the importance of the different instruments in their communication repertoire are presented. Thus, media-induced organisational change in interest groups can be assessed