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

• Author: Heath Brown
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1590

■Academic Paper

Does globalization drive interest group

strategy? A cross-national study of

outside lobbying and social media

Heath Brown*

Public Management, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 445 West 59th Street, Room 3524 North Hall,

New York, NY 10019, USA

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.

Austria has been held up as a proto-typical corpo-

ratist style government: strongly reliant on coopera-

tive policymaking between the state and varied

organized interests. Austrian corporatism was so

entrenched that scholars came to refer to it as ‘an

institutional dinosaur’whose government agencies

grew distant from ‘popular demands’((Crepaz,

1995), p. 64) and public participation, reliant instead

on cozy relationships with lobbyists (Pelinka &

Bischof, 1995). It would then come as a surprise that

the Austrian Association of Food Producers res-

ponded to market inroads made by McDonald’s,

not with direct lobbying of Austrian legislators for

new regulationsor arm-twisting of the ministryof ag-

riculture forhigher foreign tariffs, but with an award-

winning social media strategy (Dogan & Dittmas,

2014). The campaign, titled ‘Austrian Butchers versus

McDonalds –A David Versus Goliath Story’,used

novel social media videos and televised advertise-

ments to gain public support for national products

by contrasting the country’sWurstsemmelwith

McDonald’s Ranch Burger. Austria is at once a

model of corporatism, but also of globalization, rank-

ing in the top five of most globalized countries in the

world. It may be that globalization, in Austria and

elsewhere, can introduce new foreign competition

like McDonald’s and also shift the strategies organi-

zations use to advance their interests by introducing

new lobbying practices—including grassroots and

outside tactics—into national contexts that have been

resistant to change in the past.

In seeking to understand this case, much public

affairs research on interest groups is inadequate be-

cause single-country studies have been the norm.

However, notable comparative research on Europe

by Jan Beyers and his many collaborators, and re-

search on outside lobbying by Ken Kollman (1998)

have begun to provide clues. We know that dy-

namic changes happening across the world over

the last several decades, especially the various di-

mensions of globalization and the emergence of

*Correspondence to: Heath Brown, John Jay College of Criminal

Justice, Public Management, 445 West 59th Street, Room 3524

North Hall, New York, NY 10019, USA.

E-mail: hbrown@jjay.cuny.edu

Journal of Public Affairs

Volume 16 Number 3 pp 294–302 (2016)

Published online 13 November 2015 in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/pa.1590

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.