How political and social change will transform the EU public affairs industry

The EU public affairs industry is failing to recognise that political and social change is rendering its traditional approach to lobbying redundant. The key change is the growing importance of public opinion. Politicians are tending to follow rather than lead public opinion. The public is becoming more individualistic and more prone to emotional appeals. Pressure groups are increasingly setting the political agenda. The Internet is reinforcing all these trends and multiplying the number of political actors. To survive and prosper, public affairs practitioners need to adopt a strategic view of public affairs, which is aligned with companies' brand strategies. This view must be based on a holistic view of politics and recognition that winning public trust, acceptance and support is the prerequisite of successful lobbying. The emphasis will therefore shift away from traditional elite lobbying towards NGO‐style campaigning and mobilisation of public support. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Does globalization drive interest group strategy? A cross‐national study of outside lobbying and social media

Social media offer a new outside lobbying tactics for interest groups, yet many examinations of social media use by interest groups have been case studies or single‐country studies. While much can be learned from those approaches, national‐level factors – such as the style of policy making and globalization – cannot be fully addressed. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the relationship between globalization and the use of social media as an outside lobbying strategy with cross‐national data. Controlling for other factors, I argue that globalization creates isomorphic pressure on interest groups to adapt new lobbying tactics, thereby increasing the likelihood of using social media and using it in certain ways. Specifically, based on data collected from interest groups operating in 13 countries, the analysis shows that globalization is associated with more internationally‐bounded social media strategies, but also with lower social media resonance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The acceptance,relevance and dominance of lobbying the EU Commission — a first‐time survey of the EU Commission's civil servants

Among public affairs techniques lobbying is by far the most mystifying one — at least in Europe. Lobbying comes from the Latin word ‘labium’ and means ‘entrance hall’ or ‘lounge’. Therein the essential meaning can be seen: today political decisions are not made in plenary assemblies but primarily in the pre‐political phase of balancing the various interests. Lobbying is to be understood as the ‘diverse intensive activities of social groups, chambers and companies in the political and bureaucratic vestibule’ (Beyme 1980). Modern lobbying on the EU level is an intermediary policy for the support of political decision making — even if some critics refuse to believe it. Lobbying at EU level has become a politically realistic dimension. Even if the mass media still take a very sceptical and negative view of lobbying in Brussels, based on the existing European taboo on influencing politics, an in‐depth analysis reveals various lobbies at work in EU institutions. Lobbying today is an essential part of all EU decision areas. This paper describes the functional theory approach of lobbying known as ‘cooperation as confrontation through communication’. For the first time, recipients of lobbying in the EU Commission are demonstrating their acceptance of lobbying efforts. The paper is based on the doctoral thesis ‘The acceptance, relevance and dominance of lobbying the EU Commission’ by Peter Koeppl, University of Vienna (unpublished). Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Media as Moderator of “the Sympathy Effect”

SUMMARY

How does public opinion respond when faced with the tragic death of a political candidate in the midst of an election campaign? The concept of the sympathy vote suggests that media coverage of the tragedy and the unification of public opinion carry the party of the deceased to victory on Election Day. Yet, the emotional dynamics of public opinion may not be so simple. This study argues that the relationship between emotion and candidate support hinges largely on behavioral expectations and media coverage. If messages violate expectations, media will focus on controversy leading to a dissipation of the sympathy effect in public opinion. This investigation elaborates on the mechanisms governing the relationship between campaigns and public opinion by emphasizing the significant link of media coverage in the process, and by defining boundaries of the concept of the sympathy vote for further theoretical consideration.     

基于SNA的突发事件网络舆情关键节点识别——以“7·23动车事故”为例

运用社会网络分析方法(SNA)研究突发事件舆情传播的网络结构特征及关键节点识别,探究舆情传播的网络结构、节点位置及相互关系对信息的传播路径、传播速度及传播范围的影响等问题。以2011年重大突发事件"7.23"动车事故为实证研究对象,运用Pajek软件生成了"7.23"信息传播网络拓扑图,基于邻接矩阵数据进行了网络密度、可达性、聚类系数和中心性测度,依据测度结果和位置角色分析对其进行关键节点分层与识别。研究表明,突发事件网络舆情的传播和扩散以社会网络结构为基础,具有复杂性和动态性特征;网络结构与节点位置决定着成员的"影响力"程度;中心关键节点的资源控制能力与信息输入输出效率具有显著的正相关性。可以通过改变中心度、聚类系数等手段嵌入式引导关键节点,减少谣言和恐慌情绪的传播。本文采用详实数据对舆情传播关键节点的分层识别,拓展了社会网络方法在应急管理领域的应用,克服了以往研究中技术与管理实践相分离的弊病。     

The Quiet Revolution? The Labour Party and Welfare Conditionality

Labour's 2017 general election manifesto contained a pledge to ‘end the punitive sanctions regime’ in the British welfare state. Whilst the specific implications of this pledge were not elaborated, such a policy would nevertheless constitute a profound break with a welfare consensus spanning over twenty years. The depth of the suggested changes on welfare are also evident in the scale of reform proposed to disability benefits, as well as plans—confirmed in August 2018 by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell—to pilot universal basic income. Collectively, these policies would seemingly be deeply at odds with public opinion on the benefits system, which over the course of the last two decades has significantly hardened. Yet despite the seemingly radical and controversial nature of the policy, it received very little media or public attention during the election campaign. This article explores Labour's ‘quiet revolution’ on welfare, examining whether Labour's new welfare approach is indeed a bold attempt to reshape public opinion on welfare or, alternatively, a mostly pragmatic reaction to changing social attitudes. The argument presented is that whilst there are persuasive explanations that Labour is responding to a change in the public mood, there is also evidence of a more ambitious goal at stake: the aim of reshaping, not simply responding to, public opinion on the welfare state.     

Dynamics of Regulatory Policymaking in Sweden: The Role of Media Advocacy and Public Opinion

While extensive literatures study the responsiveness of policy to public opinion and the influence of interest groups, few studies look at both factors simultaneously. This article offers an analysis of the influence of media advocacy and public opinion on political attention and policy change for four regulatory issues over a relatively long period of time in Sweden. The data pools together measures of public support for specific policies with new data on attention to the policy issues in the Swedish parliament, policy developments over time and detailed coding of the claims of interest advocates in two major Swedish newspapers. Analyzing this data, a complex picture without a general tendency for either public opinion or media advocacy to act as dominant forces in producing policy change is revealed, although some evidence is found that the public is successful in stimulating political attention when it supports policy proposals aimed at changing the status quo.     

“非虚构写作”在网络舆情事件中的情感动员功能与表达逻辑

社交媒体时代,舆论生态的“后真相时代”特征日益鲜明,情感与信念成为网络舆情事件的主要动力。“非虚构写作”作为将纪实报道与文学创作结合起来的写作手法,在网络舆情事件中发挥着强大的情感动员功能。通过将悲情叙事、身份标签、戏谑表达等传统的网络情感动员表达逻辑与“文史合一”、忧患意识等“非虚构写作”本土概念巧妙嫁接,“非虚构写作”引发了一系列重大网络舆情事件,呈现出社会学观察、原型叙事、文化冲突三种表达逻辑。“非虚构写作”在舆情表达、舆论监督、社会观察等方面发挥着积极作用。同时,带有深刻情感色彩的“非虚构写作”也蕴含着网络民粹主义、网络暴力、网络虚假信息等诸多风险因素。如何实现“非虚构写作”批判与建设、解构与建构、破与立等方面的平衡,这为互联网生态建设提出了新的内容和新的问题。     

微博实名制之思

作为网络社会的新型信息舆论平台,可以说近年来微博在众多的社会公共事件中扮演了重要的媒介角色,因此即将实行的微博实名制一经公布便引起了多方关注,这一政策的推出给微博平台带来了许多积极的影响,如更加稳定的运行环境、用户的言语自律等,同时也带来了一些无法忽视的问题。重点即在于对此政策利弊之处给予综合考量,并对实名制之后的微博管理提出合理的思考和建议。     

Present at creation: Italian mass support for European integration in the formative years

Abstract.  This article analyzes a period usually neglected in empirical studies of public opinion and European integration: the formative years between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. The analysis is based on one country – Italy – in which the European process was a source of deep political cleavage in the formative phase. The study of the sources and dynamics of support in these years sheds a different light on the determinants of support. More specifically, a pooled multivariate logistic analysis of six surveys conducted between 1952 and 1970 shows two things. First, it shows that public support in Italy was driven mostly by considerations that were affective and political rather than economic and utilitarian. Second, it explains under which conditions the political factors behind support (and opposition) for European integration in the 1950s and 1960s changed over time, mostly in reactions to international events and to developments in European institutionalization. The article points to the bottom-up nature of change in public support for European integration; changes in public opinion affected party positions, rather than vice versa.     

Interest groups on social media: Four forms of networked advocacy

The affordances of social media both constrain and enable new forms of political advocacy. The present study identifies four forms of networked advocacy and analyses these with emphasis on constituencies, platforms, activities, and aims. Based on over 40 semistructured elite interviews with interest group leaders and heads of communication, it first finds that interviewees distinguish between social media platforms, tailoring content and genre, to target intended audiences. Second, it finds that social media affordances make awareness‐raising and community‐building more efficient and purposeful for all groups. At the same time, only large organizations with bigger budgets, credibility, technical knowhow, and political relations, systematically engage in networked mobilization and lobbying. Third, interviewees representing these resourceful organizations underline that Twitter represents a new efficient form of middle‐stage lobbying. The study contributes empirical insights into the aims and strategies behind networked advocacy among different groups within one policy field in a local, non‐American context. Theoretically, it combines insights from networked media logics, social affordances, and interest group advocacy to conceptualize how networked media can afford a new form of lobbying conducted as real‐time, semi‐private direct communication with decision makers.     

当代中国传媒、民意与公共决策的互动探析——以电话初装费政策调整和取消为案例

描述和分析了1990年末期以来由传媒参与、促进公共政策议程的个案。在该个案中,社会意见表达得以实现,促成了公共讨论,并导致了政府对在公共讨论基础上形成之民意的政策回应。对这一进程的发生及促成因素进行了分析和解释,研究表明:传媒、民意与公共决策的互动过程有三个重要关节点:民意表达、公共讨论、政府回应。在这个过程中,传媒起到了关键性作用,它充当了形成公共意见的"公共领域"的角色与功能。除了探讨传媒、民意与公共决策的互动过程与机制之外,对本个案中表现出的遗憾与局限也做了讨论。通过本个案研究,希望为当代中国传媒、民意与公共决策互动问题提供一个微观视角。     

The rise of right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands: A discursive opportunity approach

This article seeks to explain the dramatic rise of Pim Fortuyn's right-wing populist party during the campaign for the parliamentary elections in the Netherlands in 2002. Fortuyn succeeded in attracting by far the most media attention of all political actors and his new party won 17 per cent of the votes. This article analyses how this new populist party managed to mobilise so much attention and support so suddenly and so rapidly. It uses the notion of 'discursive opportunities' and argues that the public reactions to Pim Fortuyn and his party played a decisive role in his ability to further diffuse his claims in the public sphere and achieve support among the Dutch electorate. The predictions of the effects of discursive opportunities are empirically investigated with longitudinal data from newspapers and opinion polls. To study the dynamics of competition over voter support and over space in the public debate during the election campaign, an ARIMA time-series model is used as well as a negative binomial regression with lagged variables to account for the time-series structure of the data. It is found that discursive opportunities have significantly affected the degree to which Fortuyn was successful both in the competition for voter support, and regarding his ability to express his claims in the media. Combining these two results, a dynamic feedback process is identified that can explain why a stable political situation suddenly spiralled out of equilibrium. Visibility and supportive reactions of others positively affected the opinion polls. Consonance significantly increased Fortuyn's claim-making; dissonance undermined it. Furthermore, electoral support and negative claims on the issue of immigration and integration in the media by others enhanced Fortuyn's ability to further diffuse his viewpoints and to become the main political opinion-maker during the turbulent election campaign of 2002.     

Public Support for Corporate Social Responsibility in the Welfare State: Evidence from Sweden

Several scholars have claimed that we are currently witnessing a growing saliency of so‐called ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR). Yet, while there is a lot of work suggesting that public opinion might prompt firms to behave in socially responsible ways, there is a lack of empirical studies exploring the extent ordinary to which citizens actually support CSR. Moreover, the state is conventionally theorised as the main institutional device for governing markets and their social consequences, and there is a growing literature exploring the relationship between CSR and the state. On the basis of these observations, this article juxtaposes public attitudes towards CSR and state intervention in the market. Considering that attitudes might vary across groups with different structural relationships to the firm, this study also looks at the social bases of support for different attitude profiles. Using Swedish survey data collected in 2011 and latent class analysis, the empirical results demonstrate that most Swedes in favour of CSR are highly supportive of state intervention in the market. The study of social cleavages restates this pattern: social groups with fewer marketable resources are strongly over‐represented in supporting a combination of CSR and state intervention in the market. No clear social profile is found for the relatively small group of people who support CSR but not state intervention. It is concluded that voluntary CSR is unlikely to offer a serious full‐scale alternative to the welfare state: Swedes continue to think of public authorities as the ultimate institutional guarantor of social welfare.     

论公共政策议程建立过程中媒体的影响

由于媒体具有覆盖面广、信息容量大和传播迅速的特点,一个社会问题一旦经过媒体的放大很快就能形成强大的社会舆论,因而就能对政府政策议程的建立产生很大的影响。但是,媒体对于公共政策议程建立的影响力也受到自身存在的某些问题的制约。在公共政策议程建立过程中要协调和处理好媒体与政府、公众三者之间关系。     

Empowering the Party-Crasher: Donald J. Trump,the First 2016 GOP Presidential Debate,and the Twitter Marketplace for Political Campaigns

This article argues that an important political marketplace of keywords expands in social media around campaign events such as a debate; that rhetorical efforts to define the situation in which a campaign event occurs are met in this marketplace by user responses that more or less echo the keywords, thereby enhancing or diminishing the political power of their “caller” or speaker; and that social media monitoring platforms can enhance our understanding of public opinion influence competitions among candidates through the careful selection, tabulation, and inspection of words and phrases being voiced. In the case at hand, an analysis of Twitter volume data and a reading of a sample of 1200 tweets between July 30 and August 15, 2015, a period enveloping the first 2016 Republican presidential candidate debate on August 6, 2015, helps us understand how Donald J. Trump escaped political punishment from party and media elites for subverting Republican and U.S. norms of candidate behavior. Elite voices greatly disapproved of Trump’s debate performance and conduct, a traditional augury of declining public support. But the presence of social media voices enhanced Trump’s capacity to succeed with an insurgent marketing strategy, one he would continue into his election as president fifteen months later. Specifically, comparatively high user volume on a debate-oriented section of Twitter (i.e., posts with the hashtag #GOPDebate) for Trump’s name, slogan, and Twitter address, and for such advantageous keywords as “political correctness,” “Megyn Kelly,” and “illegal immigration” relative to terms and phrases favoring other candidates and Republicans as a whole indicates the presence of heavy and active popular support for Trump. The contents of the corresponding tweet sample exhibit Twitter-savvy techniques and populist stances by which the Trump campaign solicited that support: celebrity feuding, callouts to legacy media allies, featured fan comments, a blunt vernacular, and confrontational branding. The contents also illustrate ways in which users manifested their support: from the aforementioned high keyword volume to imitative behavior and the supplying of evidence to verify Trump’s contested claims during the debate.     

Network Structure and Perceived Legitimacy in Collaborative Wildlife Management

The widespread supposition that collaborative management designs enhance legitimacy must be examined empirically, and the rich diversity of different collaborative arrangements should be better acknowledged in this endeavor. This study adopts a social network perspective and examines three state‐initiated and interest‐based collaborative management arenas in Swedish wildlife management: wildlife conservation committees (WCCs). Is there a link between social network structures in collaborative management arenas and the perceived legitimacy of output by policy stakeholders? This puzzle is addressed through social network analysis combined with survey data and interviews. The empirical results confirm the notion that collaborative arenas consisting of high network closure with many bridging ties across organizational boundaries enjoy a higher level of support among stakeholders directly involved in management, as members of the committees, than networks with a more sparse structure do. This type of well‐integrated network structure seemingly increases stakeholders’ understanding of other actors’ perspectives through deliberation. Contrary to what was expected, though, the empirical analysis did not verify the effect of linking, or outreaching ties between the committee members and the organizations that they represent, on the organizations’ support of WCC decisions. Given the rapid rise of collaborative designs in public administrations, the topic elaborated in this paper is urgent and further research is encouraged.     

Penal Populism and the Public Thermostat: Crime,Public Punitiveness,and Public Policy

This article makes the case that feedback processes in democratic politics—between crime rates, public opinion, and public policy—can account for the growth of penal populism in Britain. It argues that the public recognize and respond to rising (and falling) levels of crime, and that in turn public support for being tough on crime is translated into patterns of imprisonment. This contributes to debates over the crime–opinion–policy connection, unpacking the dynamic processes by which these relationships unfold at the aggregate level. This uses the most extensive data set ever assembled on aggregate opinion on crime in Britain to construct a new over‐time measure of punitive attitudes. The analysis first tests the thermostatic responsiveness of punitive attitudes to changes in recorded crime rates as well as self‐reported victimization, and then examines the degree to which changes in mass opinion impact on criminal justice policy.     

Traveling frames: How corporate and civil society actors try to influence public administration and courts in a case on nuclear emission data in Switzerland

This paper focuses on the framing strategies lobbyists apply to influence public policy in a case on nuclear emission data in Switzerland. Framing analysis is at the heart of communication science and has been applied in lobbying settings, but framing theory has not yet been fine‐tuned to the specificities of public affairs research. This qualitative case study gives insights into the dominant frames seven actors ranging from corporations to nongovernmental organizations to public institutions employ to defend a legal court case in the nuclear power industry. The results of the document analysis and the interviews show that frames travel among diverse actors and only some are picked up by the courts, at times stating a position opposite to the one initially intended by the frame sponsor. A public affairs‐specific integrated process model of framing is presented that views the media in the role of a moderator in the framing process and pronounces the lobbying organizations' strategic goals, the different stakeholders as target audiences, and the outcomes of the public affairs process.     

Media Framing and Public Attitudes Toward Biofuels

This study investigates the relationship between media framing and public opinion on the issue of biofuels—transportation fuels made from plants, animal products, or organic waste. First, the paper investigates how media framing of biofuels has changed since the issue regained national prominence in the early 2000s. Through a detailed content analysis of newspaper coverage, the paper documents an increase in negative frames between 1999 and 2008, especially frames focusing on the negative economic effects of biofuels on consumers. Second, using data from a 2010 Internet survey of a random sample of the U.S. public, the paper analyzes the relative influence of these new media frames on public attitudes toward biofuels compared with other common predictors of public opinion, such as party ID, regional economic interests, and personal identity as an environmentalist. In general, the results confirm that public attitudes toward biofuels appear to be shaped by these new media frames, especially among those who indicate a high degree of attention to the media, suggesting the relative importance of framing effects on policy attitudes for environmental and energy policies in general.