Introduction

Only recently, functional explanations of political actors’ media-related behavior have aroused political communication scholars’ interest (Fawzi 2014; Kepplinger 2008; Van Aelst and Walgrave 2016). Previous research on the media-politics relation has mainly focused on how the media affect politics, for instance the media’s agenda-setting power. However, a functional perspective may help to understand the media’s role in politics in a more comprehensive way. This is because the media’s power not only results from the influence of their political coverage on politics, but also from the way political actors use the media to pursue their political goals and the way they use the media as a political platform (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2016). Thus, based on the key question of the uses and gratification approach this perspective asks “what do political actors do with the media?” (Fawzi 2014). Do political actors use media coverage as indicator of public opinion? Do different actors from the political arena communicate to each other via media? Do political actors try to influence the political agenda or legislation through media coverage? And do politicians use the media in a different way than non-governmental actors?

To structure previous research addressing such questions, Van Aelst and Walgrave (2016, also see introduction to this book) presented a typology of the media’s functions which distinguishes media as a source of information and as political arena. This paper aims at analyzing the importance of both functions empirically from political actors’ point of view. It will take a wide range of political actors that are involved in policy-making from inside and outside the political-administrative system into account and is hereby based on a very broad understanding of political actors. It will first present a theoretical framework on the media’s functions, followed by the results of a quantitative survey of German Members of the Bundestag, civil servants and non-governmental actors like associations, NGOs, and researchers all involved in the case of Energy policy .

Theoretical Framework

This paper will focus on the two basic media functions for political actors proposed by Van Aelst and Walgrave (2016): The media (1) as an information source and (2) as a political arena to communicate with citizens and other actors. Most research focuses on the media’s role for politicians, little is known about other political actors involved in the policy-making process like members of the administration, lobbyists or scientists although they play a crucial role in policy-making. Civil servants prepare and implement laws, processes that are often disregarded by the media. Lobbyists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and researchers provide information and expertise during this process on the one hand, on the other hand at least the first two groups want to influence the legislation process in their desired direction (Leif and Speth 2003). As a large part of these processes take place behind closed doors, not only politicians but also administrations and associations are being criticized of lacking adequate democratic legitimation (e.g. Koch-Baumgarten 2010).

That is where the media come in. They provide political actors a platform to communicate to the public and to other political actors but also to receive political news themselves. However, to make use of these functions, political actors have to fulfill necessary conditions. It may sound trivial, but to use the media as an information source and monitoring tool, political actors actually need to follow media coverage. In fact, most organizations receive or produce press reviews to observe media coverage about them and to generally learn what is going on in the political world; especially politicians are often called “news junkies” (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2016, p. 11), but empirical data on the actual media use of the political elite is scarce.

Moreover, to make use of the media as a strategic policy instrument, political organizations try to influence media coverage, for instance, by publishing press releases, holding press conferences, giving interviews to journalists, or holding background talks and other forms of informal communication (Baugut and Reinemann 2013). Thus, this study will first analyze how intensively political actors use the media and to what extent their organizations are concerned with media-related work.

Media as Information Source

Due to the complexity of policies, it is almost impossible to stay up to date on all political events, positions and strategies of the relevant political actors, political negotiations or citizens’ opinions towards the respective policies. However, information is a central political resource; thus, political actors—just like citizens—use the media to get an overview on what is going on in the political world (Deutsch 1963). This means that the media can substitute direct, personal political observations for political actors and provide a summary of current political problems (Cobb and Elder 1981). Requiring information from inside and outside the political system (Davis 2007; Voltmer and Koch-Baumgarten 2010), political actors may search for various information in the media: information about societal problems, about what is going on in their policy field or to learn about public opinion. In the following, this study will focus on information about citizens and other political actors.

Citizens. Media are regarded as an important intermediary that connects citizens, parties, organizations and institutions with each other. From the elites’ perspective media coverage is an easily accessible source in contrast to other indicators of public opinion like polls that are often not available. Several studies have indeed shown that politicians consult the media agenda as a proxy of public opinion (Cohen 1972; Herbst 1998; Pritchard 1992; Wittkämper 1986), either because they assume that the media strongly influence public opinion (Cohen et al. 2008) or that media coverage reflects public opinion. However, research has also yielded contradictory findings that cast doubt on the assumption that the media serve as an important indicator of public opinion for politicians (e.g. Davis 2007).

Although it seems more important for politicians who are directly voted by citizens to be informed about their acceptance among voters, ministries, lobbying companies and associations might also be interested in how citizens’ perceive and assess their organization or work. Thus, the following research question asks, how important media coverage is for politicians and other political actors to obtain information on citizens’ opinion.

Political Actors. It is the media’s task to cover current political events to inform citizens. This information, however, is also useful for political actors . It can be used to monitor the political arena and to receive information about the strategies of other political actors or the results of negotiations that often take place behind closed doors (Sellers 2009). Thus, media are said to be “active agents in stimulating, filtering and structuring the inputs of the policy process” (Cobb and Elder 1981, p. 392) and to fulfill a “map-making function” for the political elite (Cohen 1963, p. 12). Luhmann (1992, pp. 84–85) has described this function by the mirror metaphor. Political actors use the same media to observe other political actors and themselves. And more importantly they are aware that they are being watched by the media and consider this during their actions (see also Weiss 1988, p. 13).

In a quantitative survey of US policymakers, a large proportion said that they use media coverage for information on the government and for information on their own policy (Linsky 1986). This information function of the media was analyzed in more detail with regard to foreign policy. For instance, a diplomat interviewed for the study pointed out the media’s general importance: “So many negotiations are going on at the same time that you can’t be involved in all of them. The press helps you keep informed about other negotiations that may affect what you are doing.” (Davison 1974, p. 181) Other studies have shown that during international negotiations media sometimes where the first source for information or even the only available source (Gilboa 2002; O’Heffernan 1994). Moreover, it has been argued that especially political actors who are not involved in the legislation process like NGOs might use the media to monitor what is going on within the political arena (Cobb and Elder 1981; Cohen 1986; Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010). Thus, the next research question is interested in how important media coverage is for politicians and other political actors to obtain political information on other actors in the political process.

Media as Political Arena

Of course, all organizations involved in the political process have an interest to work on media relations to receive favorable media coverage. For instance, in surveys with MPs from Sweden and the Netherlands a large part of politicians stated that they would “do anything to get media coverage” or that it is more important to receive media coverage than to work hard (Brants et al. 2009; Strömbäck 2011, pp. 433–434). But what exactly do politicians want to reach when the media report about them?

Addressing Citizens. There is no doubt that the media are the most important channel for political actors to reach citizens. Thus, political actors, especially politicians who have to be successful in personalized elections need to appear in the media to make citizens aware of their positions and achievement and to be able to legitimate their actions. A positive media reputation is an important resource for both governmental and non-governmental actors. For instance, the most important goals of German members of state parliaments’ media relations are “explaining their political views”, “making their political work public” and “increasing public awareness for themselves” (Marx 2009, p. 191). Several studies have shown that organizations make huge efforts to influence public opinion via mass media and how successful they are in spinning information in the desired way (McCright and Dunlap 2003; Oreskes and Conway 2010). However, we still do not know much about how important politicians and other political actors assess the media coverage for addressing citizens.

Addressing other political actors during the political process. Mass media can serve as a political arena comparable to other political arenas like the parliament. However, not much attention has been paid to this role of the media explicitly (see Van Aelst and Walgrave 2016); just a few qualitative case studies indicate that policymakers use the media strategically during the policy process (e.g. Bennett 1988; Cohen 1986; Cook 1989; Kingdon 1984). Taking a closer look at the individual stages of the policy cycle, we can see that the media are said to play different roles. The media are assessed as an important tool to influence the political agenda by agenda-building techniques, thus, to be of particular importance in the beginning of the political process (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; van Noije et al. 2008). The next research question will address this assumption: Do politicians and other political actors use the media to put their issues on the political agenda?

During the next step of policy-making—policy formulation—the media’s role seems to change. Kingdon (1984) showed that while political actors go public when they want to influence the political agenda, they avoid publicity when aiming at influencing legislation. The reason for that is that they favor personal, non-public discussions with public administration, politicians and lobbyists (p. 94). In contrast, other studies indeed demonstrated that politicians use the mass media strategically during policy formulation. Davis (2003, p. 683) for instance, showed that politicians purposely fight “leadership battles” in the media to support their own political goals. In further qualitative studies, the interviewed politicians observed that participants of negotiations, especially in foreign policy, communicate via media with each other by, for instance, sending signals of their willingness to cooperate (Cobb and Elder 1981, p. 392; Davison 1974, p. 184; O’Heffernan 1994, pp. 236–237). Due to this supporting role, Gurevitch (1991) even described journalists as “international political brokers”. The media can serve as a tool to influence other political arenas (Sellers 2009). Policymakers do admit that they leak secret information to journalists, for example to receive attention for an issue, to force the processing of an issue or to mobilize public support for it (Brants et al. 2009; Davis 2003; Linsky 1986; Sellers 2009; Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski 2010). Moreover, Wittkämper et al. (1986) showed in a quantitative survey in Germany that policymakers tried to involve journalists especially during policy-making to receive supporting media coverage to better legitimate their decisions.

Using the media as a policy instrument might be especially important for those actors with no direct political power . In Linsky’s (1986) survey, policymakers agreed that political actors outside the government are able to increase their influence via media coverage. Accordingly, surveys with members of trade associations showed that the most important goal of their media relations—besides building up a positive image—is influencing the legislation process (Schütte 2010). With regard to NGOs, going public to influence policy-making is one of their key strategy, e.g. Greenpeace is well-known for their public campaigns to arrest attention to issues but also to influence policy-making (Lucht 2001). The next research question therefore asks whether politicians and other political actors try to influence policy-making via media coverage.

Methods

Method and Design

The literature review showed that there is no study yet that systematically analyzed both media functions for the diverse groups of political actors that are involved in policy-making. Thus, this paper aims at providing first insights in this matter. To analyze those actors that actually interact with each other and to be able to compare their perceptions, one policy area was selected. Being a very relevant policy area, where crucial long-term decisions are taken and a wide spectrum of policymakers is involved, energy policy served as a case.

The relevant actors were selected by a press database (European Energy Exchange AG 2009) and Brand and Corbach’s (2005) analysis of the stakeholders in Energy policy. For each group of actors beside the Members of the Bundestag, public relations (PR)employees were also included to get a complete picture of media’s functions for those organizations.

A quantitative survey of the following political actors was conducted in spring 2011. The executive and legislative actors included all members from the German Bundestag of the six committees that are concerned with energy issues (n = 212) as well as all six ministries that work in energy policy . Here, all directors of departments that were specialized in energy policy were chosen. This procedure was also applied to the government agencies. For both, ministries and agencies, one PR employee has also been considered (n = 161). The group of non-governmental actors comprised trade associations and NGOs dealing with energy and environmental issues. To identify them the list of the press database and the lobby list of the German Bundestag (associations and NGOs can register there voluntarily) were consulted. Per association one executive director and one PR employee was chosen randomly (n = 249; some associations didn’t have a PR employee). Furthermore, all research institutes’ directors listed in the press database were selected as well as one PR employee if present (n = 110).

Measures

Media Use. Political actors’ intensity of media use was analyzed by asking respondents how often they use newspapers, radio, TV, online media and social media for professional purpose (5-point scale from “never” to “daily”).

Media Work. In an open question, respondents were asked how much time they spend with media-related work such as “reading press reviews, write press releases, plan media strategies, giving interviews etc”.

Media as Information Source. Respondents had to assess on a 5-point scale (1 = does not apply, 5 = fully applies) for which purposes they observe media coverage: one item with regard to citizens (“to inform ourselves about the acceptance of our issues and projects among citizens”) and three items for the political process (e.g. “to inform ourselves about the strategies and interests of other energy policy actors”).

Media as Political Arena. Respondents were asked to assess on a 5-point scale the goals of their media relations: two items with citizens as target group (e.g. “to convince citizens of our activities”) and three items with regard to other political actors (e.g. “to set our issues on the political agenda”, “to influence the legislation”).

Response

The written questionnaire was sent out to 742 policymakers in April 2011; of those 262 responded (response rate 35.3%). This may appear a rather low rate but is similar or even better than other elite surveys in Germany (Kepplinger 2007; Pontzen 2006). Response rates were different for the five groups of actors: politicians (26%) and ministries (27%) answered less often than representatives of associations and NGO leaders (37%), civil servants (42%) and scientists in research institutes (43%).

Across the research questions, PR employees’ and policymakers’ perceptions did not differ significantly from each other (p > 0.05). Therefore, the following analysis will compare the main political group of actors: politicians and civil servants (ministries and departments) represent the political-administrative system. Trade associations, NGOs and scientists represent the non-governmental actors.

Results

This chapter starts from the assumption that the various actors in the political arena regularly use the mass media and work on their media relations which can be confirmed by the data. For professional purposes, most actors use newspapers (84%) and online media (63%) on a daily basis, followed by radio (50%) and TV (47%). All respondents use at least one medium per day; every fourth (26%) follows daily news an all four outlet types. Politicians use the media most often, which especially holds for newspapers (95%). In 2011, when this survey was conducted, social media only played a minor role in political actors’ media repertoire. Although the large part of parties or associations already had Facebook and Twitter accounts, the elite themselves did not follow them regularly. It was most likely politicians (33%) who used social media on a daily basis, only few association officers (14%), members of the administration (8%) and scientists (8%) did so.

Contemplating all media related work (beside media use this also includes contact to journalists, planning media strategies etc.) political actors state to spend more than one hour a day on such tasks (1.2 hours). On average, Members of the Bundestag even spend almost two hours (1.8), but civil servants (both 1.2) as well as scientists (1.0) are also concerned with media activities. In this case, PR staff differs significantly from all other actors. Not surprisingly, media relations take more time of their daily resources (4.2 hours).

Media as Information Source

Figure 13.1 depicts a first impression of the overall importance of the media’s information function . It shows that the majority of respondents do perceive the media to be an important information source, especially to learn about what is going on in the political world.

Fig. 13.1
figure 1

Note N = 258–262. 5-point scale: 1 = “does not apply”, 5 = “fully applies”; Percentages summarize both approving scale digits (4 + 5)

Overall importance of the media’s information and arena functions

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Specifically, we were interested in how important the media are for receiving information on citizen’s opinion for the different groups of political actors. Most of the respondents (61%) do observe media coverage to learn about citizens’ acceptance of their own projects, i.e. they use media as a proxy for citizens’ opinion. This holds not only true for politicians (68%), but also for the majority of civil servants (61%), associations and NGOs (60%) and research institutes (55%), which shows that the media are of similar importance for all four groups of actors (F = 0.81, p = 0.492, η2 = 0.01).

Receiving news about political actors through media coverage is even more important for political actors. The majority of respondents (75%) monitor media coverage for information on the strategies of other political actors. This is most important for politicians (82%), researchers (82%) and associations officers (78%) but also for a large part of the administration (61%; F = 4.08, p = 0.008, η2 = 0.05). Differences are larger when it comes to information about the current political agenda (F = 11.64, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.12). Media coverage is a more important source for non-governmental actors (research institutes: 90%; associations and NGOs: 80%) than politicians (52%) and civil servants (61%) to find out which issues are currently important and processed in politics. This holds also true for information on the course and results of negotiations. A clear majority of scientists (90%) and association officers (75%) use media coverage for this purpose. However, this also applies to civil servants (71%), while it is less important for politicians (36%; F = 16.97, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.17, see Table 13.1). Although most political actors use media coverage for some information on the political arena—48% observe it for all three reasons—in a general tendency, media seem to be a more important source for actors outside the political-administrative system.

Table 13.1 The media as information source
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Media as Political Arena

For most political organizations and institutions, it is a matter of course to operate intensive PR work. The goals of this work can be regarded as the strategic use of the mass media as political arena. Figure 13.1 shows that aside from trying to influence legislation via media, the media also play an important role for the respondents as an arena.

First of all, media are indeed an important tool to reach the citizens. Most of respondents (80%) try to influence media coverage to build up a positive image; this applies to all groups of actors equally (F = 1.42, p = 0.236, η2 = 0.02). It is similarly important for them to convince citizens of their work via media coverage (77%), however, this is slightly more central for actors from the political-administrative system (politicians: 95%; civil servants: 87%) than for non-governmental actors (research institutes: 75%; associations and NGOs: 63%; F = 11.36, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.12).

Which role do media play for influencing the political process? Considering agenda-building , political actors do try to get access to the media coverage to put their issues on the political agenda (76%). This holds mostly for politicians (88%), associations (78%) and research institutes (75%). But even civil servants say they do so, although to a lesser extent (62%; F = 2.78, p = 0.042, η2 = 0.03).

Getting access to media coverage to influence legislation seems to be rather a tool of associations and NGOs (67%) but also half of the scientists (49%) and every third politicians (34%; F = 10.09, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.11) make use of it, while less civil servants (28%) name this as a goal of their media work (see Table 13.2).

Table 13.2 The media as political arena
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Discussion

This paper analyzed the functions that the media fulfill for politicians and other political actors involved in the political process. It thereby distinguished between two functions: the media as an information source and as a political arena. The importance that different types of actors attribute to the media for these functions was investigated both with regard to citizens and other political actors.

Based on a quantitative survey of German actors from inside and outside the political-administrative system in energy policy , the results show that the media play an important role in the every-day routine of political actors and the media thus fulfill relevant functions. First of all, despite their limited resources and their PR staff, the surveyed political actors spend, on average, one hour per day with media-related work. This already indicates how the media penetrate political every-day life. Moreover, this study confirms the important role of media as intermediary between citizens and political actors. From the respondents’ perspective, the media serve as a proxy for public opinion as well as an important channel to reach citizens and inform them about the own political projects and goals. This does not only hold for politicians but also for the public administration and non-governmental actors that are not directly elected by the people but also want to get access to the media to inform citizens about their projects and achievements. Against the background that these actors especially lobbyists usually work behind closed doors, this is a remarkable finding. Thus, not only politicians but also civil servants, lobbyists and energy scientists seem to put an intense effort in getting access to the media coverage, for instance to better legitimate their work to the citizens. This high importance of traditional media is also remarkable in times of direct communication possibilities between political actors and citizens, for instance via social media.

The results also showed that the media play a crucial role by connecting political actors to each other. Like citizens, political actors inform themselves in the media about what is going on in the political world. They follow media coverage to find out about other political actors’ positions or the results of negotiations. This is significantly more important for non-governmental than for actors from inside the political-administrative system. Moreover, political actors also try to let other political actors know about their own strategies and to influence the political agenda and legislation processes via the media. This holds true even for governmental actors that are directly involved in policy-making. Thus, politicians and civil servants rely on the mass media as information source and as a policy instrument, although alternative information sources and instruments are at their disposal. They seem to purposely expand the political arena by the media arena to fight the daily political battle, to wield political power and to influence policy-making. This is not in line with previous results, both with regard to lobbyists and politicians who are said to avoid publicity during policy-making (Kingdon 1984; Reunanen et al. 2010; Sellers 2009).

When comparing both media functions, the results show that the arena function seems to be slightly more important for actors from inside the political-administrative system, while the information function plays a slightly more important role for non-governmental actors. Being directly involved in the policy-making process, politicians seem to have to rely less on the media when it comes to information on current political developments. Presumably, they have easier access to more reliable, direct sources than actors from outside politics. In contrast, they use the media similar often as a proxy for public opinion than the three other groups of political actors, which is rather astonishing as their career directly depends on citizens’ votes. However, this dependence becomes more apparent within the arena function. Here, politicians are indeed keener to address citizens via media coverage than non-governmental actors. Politicians also make use of the media more often for agenda-building strategies. This is interesting against the background that they actually are able to rely on direct means (e.g. in parliament) to put their issues on the political agenda.

All in all, these findings demonstrate that political actors cannot be regarded as “victims” of the media who intrigue the political arena as mediatization research sometimes assumes. Political actors themselves instrumentalize the media arena for genuine political reasons. They thereby exert power to the media whose media coverage, in turn, affects politics. As the media report according to their own rules and presentation criteria, the actual effects might differ from the effects intended by political actors themselves. The media arena does not stand for itself but is influenced by and impacts other political arenas (Hänggli and Kriesi 2010; Strömbäck and Van Aelst 2013). This strategic use of the media is a clear reference of a self-mediatization of politics (Strömbäck and Esser 2014). It demonstrates that such a functional perspective of media-politics-relations can be a fruitful expansion to effect-oriented approaches.

The findings of this study need to be interpreted with caution for several reasons. First, this survey asked energy policy actors about the media’s role in energy policy which is a very complex and conflictual policy. However, a similar importance of media as intermediary between political actors and citizens as well as the political arena itself could be assumed in other policy fields. Though, an empirical comparison of different policy domains would be interesting for future research. Moreover, this study only addressed the importance of the media’s functions but did not analyze how successful political actors are in influencing media coverage. Do they manage to reach their goals and are they able to spin issues in a favorable way? It also did not ask about the importance of other information sources to put the importance of the media into perspective. Finally, the study did not analyze how political actors assess the information they retrieve from the media which can be factual information but also framed and slanted information (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2016). One can assume that political actors are aware of theses biases, but how do they take this into consideration when they inform themselves about political events or other political actors? Are they aware that other actors might adapt to media logic and therefore exaggerate or produce conflicts to get the media’s attention? And, finally, how do political actors make use of this information in policy-making? Are policy decisions actually based on this information?

Overall, this study is an important contribution to the media-politics literature by providing empirical results on both the information and arena function of the media for a wide spectrum of political actors. Although it revealed some differences between politicians’ and non-governmental actors’ use of the media, it showed that the media fulfill significant functions for all groups of political actors respective their political goals and their daily struggle for political power: stay updated, set the political agenda, influence legislation or being re-elected.