Conference Agenda

This paper explores the role of events as a strategy for political influence. Events have long been considered a viable strategy to obtain both media and political attention. However, there is limited knowledge of the strategic significance of events for interest groups, or how they are used in practice. Drawing from rich ethnographic data of different interest groups in the Norwegian health field, this study finds that events have become increasingly important for realizing organizational objectives, and that events are essentially multimodal, applied to gain what is labelled meso-level agenda setting. Essentially, events span the traditional divide between inside and outside lobbyism, constituting a middle stage lobbyism. By combining sociological theory with the literature on lobbyism, the study contributes to the field of strategic communication by expanding existing theoretical concepts of lobbyism as a practice.

Several studies have pointed out that most public affairs practitioners and lobbyists package their arguments in public interest rhetoric. That is, they try to show how their own proposals or proposals they are working against are somehow conducive or detrimental to reaching widely shared social goals. Still, we have limited knowledge about how these practitioners develop public interest arguments and how politicians evaluate these. This paper untangles this communicative process by using the rhetorical theory of topos in combination with a typology of the public interest adapted to liberal democracies. The data consist of 30 interviews with lobbyists and politicians working within the field of energy and the environment in Norway. The results shows that lobbyists are acutely aware of what kind of arguments politicians are willing to accept and that they adapt to the needs of the latter by combining several public interest arguments at the same time. This strategy is effective because politicians are genuinely uncertain about how they should balance different public interest claims against each other and experience that in a pluralistic society there are no fixed solutions to social problems. Thus, this has major implications for how we should understand the influence of lobbyists and how PR-practitioners can help further the public interest

Purpose – This study links the notion of responsible strategic communication to the field of lobbying at EU level. It provides empirical findings on the relevance of informal communication in EU lobbying. Focusing on functional expectations tied to informality from an actors’ perspective, this study not only includes lobbyists and their attempts to gain influence on political actors (inside lobbying) but also attempts of lobbyists to control journalistic output (outside lobbying) through informal relationships and exchange mechanisms. The results are discussed with a view to further inform the concept of ‘responsible lobbying’.

Design/methodology/approach – Building on a theoretical background from political communication, corporate political activity, informal politics and interest group research, I report findings from a qualitative content analysis of 43 semi-structured interviews with actors from lobbyism (n=27) and journalism (n=16) at EU level focussing on one policy case.

Findings –The study shows motives for establishing and using informal communication for both actor groups. Functional expectations relate to a range of tasks at the core of the respective groups’ day-to-day activities: monitoring political developments, explaining and pre-negotiating policy options in protected, confidential spas for lobbyists and getting relevant sectoral background information and ‘technical coaching’ on complex legislative dossiers for journalists.

Originality/value – Studies on lobbying have been rarely conducted from a strategic communications perspective, especially focusing the EU level. Albeit widely accepted, the understanding of lobbying as a below-the-radar and informal activity has not been scrutinized by academic research.

Keywords – EU lobbying, Responsible lobbying, Informal political communication, Strategic communication, EU interest groups