Organizational ties to political parties and interest groups’ news coverage

Interest groups often seek media attention to gain traction for their views. Media attention is scarce, however, and previous research shows that this attention tends to be directed toward more resourceful interest groups. We build on this and argue that interest groups with stronger organizational ties to political parties are more likely to appear in the news, and that this effect is positively conditioned by parties’ media attention. Organizational ties facilitate collaboration between the actors, allow for coordination of media strategies, and enable the actors to draw on each other’s media networks. Journalists may furthermore deem interest groups with stronger ties to parties as more newsworthy. We find support for our hypotheses using detailed survey data on organizational ties and a corpus of daily news content across twelve newspapers in Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom between 2016 and 2018. The study suggests that organizational connections between groups and political parties can widen media coverage of groups by promoting those that parties favor for reasons beyond their resources. Since stronger organizational ties grant interest groups direct access to political parties, the findings above all imply that media coverage of groups mimics existing patterns of access to key political decision makers.