The Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Political Interest Representation

TY - JOUR

T1 - The Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Political Interest Representation

AU - Eady, Gregory

AU - Rasmussen, Anne

N1 - Funding Information: Support for this research was provided by the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF) (Project No. 0133-00034B), and the European Research Council (ERC) (Project No. 864648). Funding Information: The paper benefited from comments received at the Annual Public Policy Seminar at King’s College London in May 2021, a webinar on the Covid pandemic organized by the University of Maastricht in June 2021, and an internal seminar at ARENA, the University of Oslo in October 2021. We thank all participants, in particular, Onna van den Broek, Peter John, Christel Koop, Matia Vannoni, Iskander de Bruycker, Daniel Naurin and Jon Erik Fossum, as well as Benjamin Radcliff and four anonymous reviewers, for their valuable feedback and suggestions. We are also grateful to Nicholas Buhmann-Holmes for valuable student assistance in compiling our list of Twitter handles. Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022.

PY - 2024/3

Y1 - 2024/3

N2 - The COVID-19 pandemic is viewed by many as the biggest global crisis since WWII and had profound effects on the daily lives of people and decision-making worldwide. Using the pandemic as a system-wide agenda shock, we employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate its causal effects on inequalities in political access, and social media prominence among business interests and NGOs. Our argument is twofold. First, the urgency and uncertainty of crises incentivized decision-makers to privilege providing access to business groups over securing inclusivity in the types of interests consulted. Second, NGOs compensated by increasing prominence in public communications. Our analysis of data from over 10,000 interest groups from over 100 countries registered in the European Union supports these hypotheses. Business interests successfully capitalized on the crisis in insider access, while NGOs increased prominence on social media. The results have wider implications for understanding how large-scale crises affect inequalities in representation.

AB - The COVID-19 pandemic is viewed by many as the biggest global crisis since WWII and had profound effects on the daily lives of people and decision-making worldwide. Using the pandemic as a system-wide agenda shock, we employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate its causal effects on inequalities in political access, and social media prominence among business interests and NGOs. Our argument is twofold. First, the urgency and uncertainty of crises incentivized decision-makers to privilege providing access to business groups over securing inclusivity in the types of interests consulted. Second, NGOs compensated by increasing prominence in public communications. Our analysis of data from over 10,000 interest groups from over 100 countries registered in the European Union supports these hypotheses. Business interests successfully capitalized on the crisis in insider access, while NGOs increased prominence on social media. The results have wider implications for understanding how large-scale crises affect inequalities in representation.

KW - Corona

KW - Covid-19

KW - Crisis

KW - Interest groups

KW - Organized interests

KW - Political behavior

KW - Political representation

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85145177484&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s11109-022-09842-x

DO - 10.1007/s11109-022-09842-x

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85145177484

SN - 0190-9320

VL - 46

SP - 657

EP - 681

JO - POLITICAL BEHAVIOR

JF - POLITICAL BEHAVIOR

IS - 1

ER -