Interest Mediation in the Media

The focus of the third module (Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte/Paweł Szczerbak, University of Duisburg-Essen) is interest groups use of media discourse for gaining influence on policy-making. The analytical approach is both synchronic and diachronic. We investigate environmental, social and migration policy during a period of 20 years (from 1994 to 2013). Taking a content analytical approach, the empirical basis of the module are policy-specific corpora derived from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). Those two resources cover approximately the general left-right dimension within the German printed media.
Using the infrastructure of the PolMine project (polmine.de) we seek to gain insights making systematic comparisons:


  • First, interest groups take an interest in contested issues and are assumed to use different arenas for gaining influence. We will analyse the variation of media attention assign to interest groups in different policy domains and changes that have occurred during the time investigated.

  • Second, we compare the presence of interest groups in media discourse and in parliamentary proceedings. The goal hereby is to learn when and how interest groups use media. We will learn more about the relevance of ‘outside’ lobbying in relation to the access groups have in parliament.

The methodological approach we use makes extensive use of technologies of automated content analysis and the statistical approach to text known as ‘text mining’:
Using the „Corpus Workbench“ as a backend, we use techniques such as ‘named entity recognition’ to identify interest groups in textual date, ‘relation extraction’ to learn about interest groups take in contested issues, classification algorithms to identify issue publics etc. We seek to go beyond merely counting the frequency of interest group presence.

Andreas Blätte   Head of Module
Paweł Szczerbak   Research Associate