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Buying media-savviness? Interest groups as clients of public affairs consultants

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Abstract

Public relations agencies are on the rise, and studies have shown that also membership-based interest groups use their services. These agencies employ public affairs consultants who help their clients influence public policy, and their use may have important consequences for interest group systems. As we know little about why interest groups use public affairs consultants and what kind of groups use them the most, we surveyed nationwide interest groups in Finland. We argue that groups use consultants especially when they face challenges with their advocacy strategies. The results show that the more important media strategies are in their advocacy work, the more groups use public affairs consultants. Business groups are more likely to use public affairs consultants than other kinds of groups. When groups’ resources are held constant, more recently established groups use more money on consultants than older groups. We conclude that consultant use may deepen existing biases in interest group politics by strengthening the business groups’ position. The results also imply that media strategies have become especially challenging for groups in the current complex media environment.

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Notes

  1. Hoffman et al. (2011) also argue that consultants are important because they may have a ‘specialized infrastructure’. However, it is unclear what this term means.

  2. In the regression analyses, we also performed a list-wise deletion of groups who had not responded to one or more of the questions used.

  3. We used the Finnish term ‘vaikuttajaviestintä’.

  4. As a robustness test, we also ran model 3 with an alternative variable that measured the frequency of using the media strategy. This yielded similar results (Tweedie: B = 0.45, p = 0.027; logistic: B = 0.496, p = 0.012), although in the logistic regressions the effects were slightly weaker than when using the variable which measured importance.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Academy of Finland (grant nr. 309934), the Kone Foundation (postdoctoral grant for Vesa), and the Finnish Government’s Analysis, Assessment and Research Activities (‘KAMU’ project). We would like to thank Anu Kantola (the principal investigator of the ‘KAMU’ project), Mika Vehka for his assistance in conducting the survey, Helena Blomberg and Christian Kroll for helping to translate the survey into Swedish, the three anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments, and everyone else who helped with the survey, gave us information, or commented on earlier versions of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 18, Unioninkatu 35, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Juho Vesa

  2. University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 54, Unioninkatu 37, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Aasa Karimo

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  1. Juho Vesa
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Correspondence to Juho Vesa.

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Appendices

Appendix 1. Descriptive statistics for variables used in regression analyses (N = 917)

 

Freq. (%)

Min

Max

Mean

Std. deviation

Euros spend on consultants

 

0

1,020,000

14,811.82

73,155.73

Privileged position

 

1

4

2.01

0.77

Groups’ age

 

2

n.a.a

44.14

32.60

Media strategy

 

1

4

2.48

0.67

Contact policymakers

 

1

4

2.64

0.95

Salient issues

 

0

3

0.76

0.65

Non-salient issues

 

0

2.92

0.55

0.43

EU policy

 

0

3

0.84

0.94

Income (ln)

 

0

18.76

11.46

2.55

Staff advocacy (ln)

 

0

4.33

0.51

0.70

% to PR services

     

 0%

74.2

    

 0.01% or more

25.8

    

Group type

     

 Business

20.6

    

 Union

12.4

    

 Institutional

6.7

    

 Professional

20.8

    

 Identity

16.1

    

 Leisure

13.2

    

 Public

10.1

    
  1. aMaximum of groups’ age is not presented to protect the anonymity of the respondents. It is close to two hundred

Appendix 2. Robustness checks

See Tables 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Table 3 Tweedie regressions with model-based estimation
Full size table
Table 4 Tweedie regressions with robust estimation and bootstrapping (5000 subsamples)
Full size table
Table 5 Tweedie regressions with robust estimation and outliers removed
Full size table
Table 6 Binary logistic regressions with model-based estimation
Full size table
Table 7 Binary logistic regressions with robust estimation and bootstrapping (5000 samples)
Full size table

Appendix 3. How the issue salience index was constructed

See Table 8.

Table 8 The most important issues facing Finland according to citizens (percentage of Eurobarometer respondents mentioning the issue)
Full size table

First, Eurobarometer data on the most important issues for citizens was obtained (Table 8).The surveyed groups were asked to indicate their activity on 19 policy areas (scale 1-4: ‘very active’ to ‘not at all active’). The following five areas match most closely the most salient issues to the public (see Table 8):

  • Labor market policy

  • Industrial and consumer policy

  • Monetary, fiscal and tax policy

  • Social affairs and families policy

  • Health policy

The variable measuring issue salience was then constructed as the mean of groups’ self-reported activity on these five areas in the following way: very (active) = 3 (points), somewhat = 2, a little = 1, and not at all or no answer = 0.

A variable measuring activity in non-salient areas was then constructed as the mean of activity on the remaining areas:

  • Urban and housing policy

  • Research, technology and communications policy

  • Defence and security policy

  • Refugee and immigrant policy

  • Religious policy

  • Local government and regional policy

  • Culture and sports policy

  • Agriculture, fishery and food policy

  • Law and order/justice policy

  • Traffic and infrastructure policy

  • Education policy

  • Foreign affairs (excluding EU)

  • Environment and energy policy

‘EU policy’ was left out because it is more about the level of policy rather than an issue in itself and because it is used as a separate control variable.

Appendix 4. Interaction effect between privileged position and importance of contacts with policymakers on the likelihood of using public affairs consultants

figure a

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Vesa, J., Karimo, A. Buying media-savviness? Interest groups as clients of public affairs consultants. Int Groups Adv 8, 552–578 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-019-00064-x

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