Page 158 →Page 159 →7. Going Public When Do Human Rights Advocates Pursue Media Strategies?
Max Grömping
cooptation to overt repression and censorship. Not least, the very arenas they seek access to—such as media, legislature, or bureaucracy—may function quite differently under autocracy so that access does not necessarily translate into influence. This is all the more salient for human rights groups, who, by their very nature, are prone to antagonize autocratic rulers. Why and when do these groups nevertheless choose to go public with their advocacy?
In this chapter, I seek to determine the factors associated with human rights groups’ decision to engage in outside lobbying. A number of influentialPage 160 → studies have examined this very question among the broader population of interest groups in Western democracies. Here scholars disagree on whether the outside strategy is spurred chiefly by issue salience (Junk 2016; Kollman 1998), group type (De Bruycker 2018; Hanegraaff, Beyers, and De Bruycker 2016; Dür and Mateo 2013; Weiler and Brändli 2015), or organizational maintenance goals (Binderkrantz, Christiansen, and Pedersen 2015; Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). Importantly, though, this literature limits itself to group- and issue-level explanations, while ignoring varying institutional constraints groups may face outside of liberal democracies. Studies of civil-society–media relations in autocracies, on the other hand, are mostly institutionalist, focusing on unilateral information control by the state, while giving less thought to societal actors’ repertoires (Lorentzen 2014; Huang, Boranbay-Akan, and Huang 2019).
In this chapter, I develop a two-fold argument. First, when broadening the scope of inquiry beyond liberal democracies, the strategic alignment of advocacy groups may play an outsized role. Groups more closely aligned with the political opposition may be more involved in outside lobbying than those closer to the government, because their key allies rely on public attention as a resource to pressure the government. Second, however, opposition alignment may become a liability where political institutions are closed to outside voices in the policy process. Specifically, we should expect stronger incentives for outside lobbying in countries where free and fair elections motivate politicians to care about public opinion and where media pluralism provides space for a variety of voices, including those critical of the government. In other words, going public promises higher cost-benefit payoffs in democracies than in autocracies, and—regardless of regime type—in open rather than closed media environments. This should therefore make outside lobbying a more attractive strategy for opposition-aligned groups only in such open contexts, but not in closed ones.
I test the merit of these claims through a case study of electoral reform advocacy organizations,1 a subclass of human rights groups who focus on the public interest issue of electoral integrity.2 I draw on a cross-national dataset of 291 organizations across 85 countries, measuring group strategies, orientations toward the opposition, and other organizational characteristics through a bespoke organizational survey (Grömping 2019). Macroinstitutional constraints are tracked by data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project (Coppedge et al. 2021) and the Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) World Press Freedom Index.
The results are surprising and lend only partial support to the above Page 161 →argument. Specifically, the extent of outside lobbying does not differ significantly between groups in democracies and those in autocracies. Neither are media pluralism or opposition alignment in themselves significant predictors of media strategies. When both factors are considered simultaneously, however, opposition-aligned groups tend to engage more, not less, in outside lobbying under authoritarianism. At the same time, a free press also increases the importance of opposition alignment. These results hold when subsetting the data for autocracies.
These findings shed light on the dynamics of policy advocacy in nondemocracies. Outside lobbying is equally present under authoritarianism as under democracy, and, against expectations, it is unrelated to the level of media pluralism. This echoes Li’s findings in chapter 8 on China, where the outside strategy is also surprisingly prevalent. However, the closer advocacy groups are to the opposition, the more important a free media becomes for them, as also found in the case of Malaysia in chapter 9. This speaks to the importance of the “regime cleavage” in authoritarian advocacy systems, where antagonizing the government and cozying up to the opposition often results in marginalization. The chapter also contributes more generally to studies of interest groups by highlighting the need for a joint appreciation of structural opportunities and group-level orientations. Overall, the statistical models have only modest explanatory power, despite controlling for other potential drivers of media strategies suggested in the literature. Some common wisdom about group strategies may travel to different contexts better than other. This calls for a much broader comparative approach to interest group studies. Finally, the findings have ramifications for research into the impacts of human rights advocacy, by specifying media work as an important yet thorny vector of influence.
The chapter proceeds with a section discussing different theories of outside lobbying. Section 3 develops the theoretical model of institutional constraints and strategic alignment. Section 4 presents data and methods, while section 5 discusses the empirical results. The chapter concludes by drawing out wider implications of the findings.
Theories Explaining Outside Lobbying
While the aim of inside lobbying is to persuade policy makers directly and nudge them toward adopting a policy preferred by the advocacy group, outside lobbying is a more indirect strategy, expanding the conflict over policy problems and solutions to a larger audience, which in turn puts Page 162 →pressure on policy makers to achieve the same result (Beyers 2004; Kollman 1998). This typically entails seeking out media attention via press conferences, publicity stunts, public mobilizations, pitching stories to journalists, or running a social media campaign (Dür and Mateo 2013; Weiler and Brändli 2015).3 To be sure, inside and outside strategies are complements rather than substitutes, as groups may involve themselves with equal intensity in both or neither (Trapp and Laursen 2017). But how do groups calibrate their lobbying efforts? How do they choose the degree of outside lobbying that they deem most beneficial?
The literature on democratic interest representation explores different explanations. On the one hand, issue characteristics may motivate the choice to pursue outside lobbying. In this view, going public serves the dual purpose of showing policy makers that an issue enjoys widespread public support—as policy makers infer salience from the effort groups expend on outside lobbying—and simultaneously expanding the scope of the conflict to larger publics (Kollman 1998, 10). Groups may also factor the salience of an issue into their decision to outside lobby because it enhances their own prominence as important players in the discussion (Junk 2016). This view therefore holds that groups advocating for publicly salient issues will expend more effort on outside lobbying.
On the other hand, groups advocating on behalf of public rather than private interests may have an intrinsic affinity to outside tactics (Hanegraaff, Beyers, and De Bruycker 2016; Dür and Mateo 2013; Weiler and Brändli 2015). Public interest groups stand to gain from an expansion of the scope of the conflict, because it increases the core resource of their pressure politics: favorable public opinion. For them, media attention may facilitate preference attainment, while private interest advocates, such as business associations, may be better off eschewing the media’s limelight (De Bruycker 2018). This second view therefore holds that groups advocating for public interest issues will more readily go public.
A third approach focuses upon organizational maintenance as an overarching goal of all advocacy groups. Specifically, member-funded pressure groups face different incentives than groups funded by outside donors or through providing services, in that they always need to keep in mind the consolidation and, if possible, expansion of their member base (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2017). Going public aids in this endeavor, as it increases the chances of attracting new recruits who only learn about the organization through the media. This may even be at the expense of gaining influence, which has often been found to be facilitated rather by direct contacts with policy makers (Mahoney 2008). This view therefore holds that more member-oriented groups should employ outside lobbying more readily.
Page 163 →These contributions provide some important baseline expectations. But how plausible is it that advocacy groups follow the same tactical logic in nondemocratic settings, where the press is often curtailed, politicians are supposedly less responsive to citizen preferences, and the very associational regulation necessary for advocacy is by default minimal? Would outside lobbying even make sense in such an environment? Indeed, studies of authoritarian regimes highlight the role of media in maintaining political control via censorship or propaganda (Lorentzen 2014; Stier 2015). Media are seen as yet another institution the regime can manipulate to divert public attention to regime-congruent issue areas (Alrababa’h and Blaydes 2021), suppress collective action while harvesting information on social preferences and policy problems (Huang, Boranbay-Akan, and Huang 2019; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013), or signal invincibility (Huang 2018). Organized civil society is seen as a more or less passive recipient of such management strategies. Outside lobbying, according to this view, will occur only to the extent that the regime benefits from it in some form.
Strategic Alignment, Institutional Constraints, and Outside Lobbying
As other chapters in this volume demonstrate, outside lobbying does occur under authoritarianism. Despite censorship and repression, media attention to issues makes autocratic legislators more responsive to public preferences, even in dictatorships (Schuler 2020), making outside lobbying a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Yet to date we know little about whether or not similar logics of action explain going public under different regime types. There is a disconnect between comparative authoritarianism scholarship with its institutionalist angle, and literature on interest intermediation, which focuses on group orientations and issue characteristics. To bridge these perspectives, I argue that two layers of influences need to be taken into account to gain a fuller understanding of the drivers of outside lobbying across a range of political systems: the strategic alignment of groups and institutional constraints.
Strategic Alignment
Advocacy groups need to seek out allies to further their cause. This is especially true for human rights advocates, given their often antagonistic relationship with the government. The political opposition—if one exists—is a natural choice in that regard. Utility-maximizing pressure groups will cater to the demands of their allies in deciding about their Page 164 →investment in a given lobbying strategy. Alignment with the opposition should provide incentives for outside lobbying for several reasons. First, their very ties with the opposition may cause groups to struggle to find inside access to government circles, leaving them with few options but to go public. Second, opposition parties are more responsive to media coverage than are government parties (Walgrave and Van Aelst 2016). Themselves facing an uphill struggle for public attention, they tend to wield media attention to issues as a weapon in legislative debate. Since media reporting tends to be driven by negativity and blame attribution (Baumgartner and Chaqués Bonafont 2015), it lends itself to such purposes. Advocacy groups who cultivate close ties with the opposition therefore gain from going public with their issue because it multiplies the arenas they get access to. Third, one of the government’s most powerful ways to preserve status quo policies is to keep an issue off the political agenda altogether (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). Any proponents of changes to the status quo—likely those whose position is closer to the opposition’s—will therefore benefit disproportionally from media attention simply because this helps them set an issue onto the agenda in the first place. Importantly, this argument does not imply that opposition alignment automatically puts groups at odds with the government. It is indeed possible that they foster close relationships with both sides in order to hedge their bets (Statsch and Berkhout 2020). In electoral autocracies, too, not all opposition is devoted to overthrowing the regime (Helms 2021), and coalitional choices of groups may focus on opposition parties, regime parties, or both. Yet the political logic of the opposition demands media attention as a key variable, absent many other power resources. For the government, media attention is often optional. The incentives for advocacy groups are therefore such that all else being equal advocacy groups more closely aligned with the political opposition are more likely to engage in outside lobbying (H1).
Institutional Constraints
In a naïve pluralist world, outside lobbying may shore up public pressure on politicians who are then compelled to act. This rests on two critical assumptions: first that the media system transmits diverse societal voices, and second that inside actors in the policy process, such as legislators or bureaucrats, are amenable to information provided by outside sources, either information about constituent interests or expert knowledge about policy issues. In liberal democracies, where press freedom is guaranteed Page 165 →and electoral mechanisms motivate and constrain policy makers, these assumptions are met. But where elections are either severely curtailed or no multiparty competition takes place at all, and where liberal practices such as freedom of the press are disregarded, these basic assumptions may not hold.
There are therefore some important institutional prerequisites to make outside lobbying a viable strategy. The first is a functioning electoral link between citizens and politicians. The logic of outside lobbying is one of expanding the scope of conflict from a group’s core supporters to “bystanding” publics. The calculus is that these publics then pressure policy makers to adjust their position; ideally, their sheer number will provide electoral leverage that may threaten incumbent politicians. This logic, however, holds only if the electoral link is intact, meaning that policy makers face the prospect of losing office if they do not comply with public preferences. We know, of course, that the electoral playing field is severely skewed under authoritarianism and that incumbents are ensured or at least disproportionately more likely to return to office (Levitsky and Way 2010; Schedler 2006). This makes outside lobbying much less attractive, since it may entail the misallocation of a group’s limited resources on the uncertain gamble that politicians actually care about public opinion. Instead, they may be better off leveraging personal connections or inside access to get what they want. I therefore expect that all else being equal, advocacy groups are more likely to engage in outside lobbying in democracies than in autocracies (H2a).
A second prerequisite is a pluralistic media ecology that facilitates widespread access and the free flow of information (Norris and Odugbemi 2009). The media’s gatekeeping role is particularly pertinent for human rights groups, as they depend on the provision of an open arena for diverse societal voices. Yet authoritarian regimes curtail this arena function of the media through libel laws, censorship, or sometimes violent repression (Lorentzen 2014; Stier 2015). In many democracies, too, the press has come under pressure, and media freedom varies greatly across both authoritarian and democratic regimes (Whitten-Woodring and van Belle 2017). When the prerequisite of a pluralistic communicative arena is not fulfilled, it makes little sense for groups to appeal to the public via the media. They would have to expect their voice to be distorted or completely ignored and might be better off appealing directly to policy makers rather than engage in the uphill struggle for media attention. This logic holds that the functioning of the media as a permeable public sphere is likely related to groups’ tactical choices, so that all else being equal media pluralismPage 166 → is positively associated with advocacy groups’ involvement in outside lobbying (H2b).
Finally, the role of groups’ strategic alignment may vary depending on the degree of institutional constraints. A number of contemporaneous cases demonstrate surprising successes of citizen groups in diverse policy issues, despite a media landscape nominally not conducive to outside advocacy. Consider, for instance, the Malaysian case discussed in chapter 9, where electoral reform groups relied on media strategies and close relationship with the political opposition to incrementally set electoral reform on the political agenda (see chapter 9). Advocacy groups’ reliance on allies among the opposition may be greater in autocracies compared to democracies. But at the same time, their ability to garner media attention likely decreases. As chapters 5 and 6 in this volume demonstrate, opposition-aligned groups often risk ostracization and marginalization. Furthermore, media attention to groups is adversely affected by restrictions on press freedom (Grömping 2019), possibly counteracting the logic of strategic alignment. Group-level and institutional incentives for outside lobbying are therefore inversely related to each other, so that one should expect an interaction such that the positive effect of opposition alignment on outside lobbying is reduced in autocracies (H3a) and where media pluralism is restricted (H3b).
Data
I test these propositions by taking a globally comparative look at advocacy groups in a specific human rights issue industry: electoral integrity. Empirically, I draw on a dataset of domestic election monitoring initiatives (DEMIs).4 This data is based on a comprehensive mapping of 1,176 citizen-based electoral observation and reform groups in all countries around the world. Organizational variables are measured through a survey of these groups (response rate 41 percent), and country-level variables are monitored through data from V-Dem (Coppedge et al. 2021).
The dependent variable, involvement in outside lobbying, is measured from nine survey items asking responding groups how frequently they engaged in certain activities (Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, or Always) during the last election in their country. I conducted a principal component analysis on the nine items with oblique rotation (oblimin). The items clustering on the second component fit theoretical expectationsPage 167 → for outside lobbying strategies and encompass contacting journalists, writing op-eds, initiating litigation, organizing demonstrations, and contacting political parties. The factor score of this second component is then extracted to create the continuous dependent variable “outside lobbying.”5
The extent of strategic alignment can be gleaned from two items in the DEMI survey instrument asking respondent organizations “In general, how would you describe your organization’s relationship with . . . the current opposition?” and “. . . the government?” Answer options ranged on a 5-point scale from “very conflictual” (1) to “very cooperative” (5). For opposition alignment the mean is 3.54 and the median is 4, indicating that a plurality of groups have good relationships with the opposition. The results are almost identical regarding groups’ stance vis-à-vis the government, with a mean of 3.49 and a median of 4. The pairwise correlation coefficient of these two variables is 0.41 (p < .001), indicating that there are indeed some groups fostering close cooperation with both the opposition and the government. The independent variable strategic alignment is calculated as the difference between these two indicators, ranging from −3 (very close to the government and very conflictual with the opposition) to 4 (very close to opposition, very conflictual with government). The variable is roughly normally distributed, with about 60 percent of groups being equally cooperative with both camps, and pro-government and pro-opposition alignment tailing off at both ends.
The role of regime type is measured via V-Dem’s Regimes of the World indicator. Most groups (88 percent) operate in either electoral autocracies or electoral democracies. I therefore dichotomize this measure, subsuming those organizations operating under democracy (either electoral or liberal democracy) in one category (144 groups) and those in closed or electoral autocracies in the other (147).
I track media pluralism via the Reporters sans frontières (RSF) Press Freedom Index.6 This captures restrictions to media pluralism due to legal frameworks, abuses and harassment, or lacking infrastructures. For the analysis here it is reversed and normalized to a scale of zero to 100. For the countries under observation, media reporting is most restricted in Sudan (press freedom score of 27), and most free in Austria (87).
In addition, I control for some alternative explanations of outside lobbying. To start with, being beholden to its members may incentivize a group to use outside lobbying for organizational maintenance. The logic Page 168 →here is that media attention also increases the likelihood of attracting new (paying) members. This is controlled for through an indicator of member orientation measured as the percentage of a group’s budget derived from membership fees. Next, I control for a group’s resources with an ordinal index constructed from the group’s annual budget in an election year, the number of paid full-time staff employed, and the number of volunteers working for the group (see Grömping 2019). Furthermore, I account for groups’ international linkage. Human rights advocates may leverage transnational advocacy networks (TANs) to exert pressure on noncompliant governments (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Those opting for this strategy have further incentives to engage in outside lobbying to draw in international media. Furthermore, international donors may want to see returns on their investment, something that can be usefully demonstrated by appearing in the press. I control for this possibility with an indicator counting the international organizations and international NGOs that a group has thus far collaborated with. I adjust for skewness in the count by logging raw values, adding a value of one to those organizations with zero links before taking the log.
Beyond organizational characteristics, issue salience may push groups into the outside strategy (Kollman 1998). It could simply be more efficient to seek media attention in issue areas that the media already focuses on. I measure salience as the extent of news coverage of elections as a proportion of the total news agenda in that country. This variable is constructed from news content analysis conducted in the context of another related project (see Grömping 2019). In addition, outside lobbying may be a function of competition in the advocacy group ecology, as this may drive groups toward media-centric strategies to stand out against their competitors both in terms of securing influence and attracting members and funds (Hanegraaff, Beyers, and De Bruycker 2016). I therefore record the logged count of advocacy groups that occupy the same issue space (electoral reform), standardized by population. Furthermore, the extent to which opposition alignment may or may not drive outside lobbying is likely dependent on the degree of autonomy of opposition parties. Where opposition parties are merely coopted proxies for a ruling party, the logic of opposition alignment falls flat. I control for this possibility via the V-Dem indicator on opposition autonomy, ranging from 1 (no autonomous opposition parties) to 4 (all opposition parties are autonomous). Finally, I control for logged population on the assumption that larger countries have much larger media markets with the potential to activate bystanding publics.
Page 169 →Results
The analysis proceeds in four steps: First, I describe the distribution of the dependent variable at group and regime level. Next, I look at the association between explanatory factors and outside lobbying individually, third at how institutional constraints condition the relationship between alignment and outside lobbying, and fourth, I subset the data to look only at authoritarian regimes. I use OLS regression models throughout.7
First, the indicator for outside lobbying is normally distributed and ranges from −2.72 (lowest outside lobbying) to 3.21 (highest). The first and most surprising finding is that there is little difference in the prevalence of outside lobbying across different political regime types. Although, on average, groups based in autocracies engage in outside lobbying slightly more (m = 0.033, SD = 0.96), when compared to democracies (m = −0.033, SD = 1.04), this difference in group means is not statistically significant, (t(286) = 0.56, p = 0.58). This presents a startling puzzle and stands in stark contrast to hypothesis H2a. On first glance, it appears that electoral linkage is hardly related to groups’ decision to privilege public lobbying tactics over inside access.
Second, neither strategic alignment by itself nor institutional constraints explain variation in outside lobbying choice. Table 7.1 shows the coefficient estimates for independent variables of interest as well as group-level control variables for four models. Model M1 is a “baseline” model with only control variables included. As we see, the fit is not very good, with an R2 of only 0.09. Furthermore, several alternative explanations repeatedly cited in the literature on outside lobbying do not seem to explain variation, at least in this specific issue area of electoral reform advocacy. What the model does show is that groups’ resources, their international linkage, and the autonomy of opposition parties are all positively correlated with involvement in outside lobbying. Model M2 introduces the independent variables of interest. Neither alignment, nor regime type, nor media pluralism explain variation in outside lobbying. This second surprising result might be due to the dual nature of groups’ strategic calculations when deciding to go public. On the one hand, media strategies are frequently seen as a weapon of the weak, of those groups that lack inside access (Kollman 1998, 107). On its face, this sems to describe oppositional groups in diverse institutional settings. But there is also a tendency among all advocacy groups toward “complementary lobbying,” in which they lobby both supporters and opponents of a given policy, especially on high-salience issues (Statsch and Berkhout 2020). Groups with Page 170 →good relations with the opposition may therefore have equally good ties with the government that equal out in the operationalization of the variable used here. The effects of alignment on outside lobbying may thus be canceled out by complementary lobbying, due to the contradicting logics of influence production of opposition alignment and government alignment.
|
Table 7.1. Explaining Outside Lobbying |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Dependent Variable: Outside Lobbying |
||||
|
M1 |
M2 |
M3 |
M4 |
|
|
Estimate (SE) |
||||
|
(Intercept) |
–1.85 (.96)* |
–2.27 (1.23)* |
–2.61 (1.20)* |
-.80 (1.73) |
|
Autocracy (1 = Yes) |
.07 (.15) |
.04 (.15) |
||
|
Media pluralism |
.00 (.01) |
.00 (.01) |
.00 (.01) |
|
|
Opp. Alignment |
.06 (.07) |
–1.41 (.41)*** |
-.94 (.42)* |
|
|
Autocracy X Opp. Alignment |
.38 (.15)* |
|||
|
Media pluralism X Opp. Alignment |
.02 (.01)** |
.02 (.01)* |
||
|
Resources |
1.00 (.39)* |
1.04 (.40)** |
.93 (.40)* |
.88 (.54) |
|
Member orientation |
.00 (.00) |
.00 (.00) |
.00 (.00) |
.01 (.01) |
|
Int’l linkage |
.22 (.09)* |
.21 (.09)* |
.22 (.09)* |
.13 (.12) |
|
Salience |
-.26 (.53) |
-.35 (.56) |
-.31 (.56) |
-.23 (.66) |
|
Competition |
-.25 (.25) |
-.22 (.26) |
-.16 (.25) |
1.22 (.59)* |
|
Opposition autonomy |
.37 (.12)** |
.39 (.13)** |
.39 (.12)** |
.36 (.17)* |
|
Population (log) |
-.00 (.05) |
.01 (.05) |
.03 (.05) |
-.07 (.08) |
|
R2 |
.09 |
.09 |
.14 |
.18 |
|
Adj. R2 |
.06 |
.06 |
.10 |
.11 |
|
Num. obs. |
267 |
267 |
267 |
133 |
|
***p < 0.001; **p < 0.01; *p < 0.05 Note: Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. M1-M3 = all countries. M4 = only autocracies. |
||||
The lack of any association with media pluralism on its own is equally puzzling. Possibly, advocacy groups use outside lobbying to signal to donors that they are “doing something,” that is, spending the money effectively. This is particularly pertinent for groups such as electoral reform NGOs who receive the bulk of their funding from international sources. This motivation is independent of media pluralism and may thus explain this unexpected result.
Third, however, when introducing interactions into the model (M3), there are some clear and surprising trends, and the fit of the model improves. It appears that the effect of strategic alignment is conditional on Page 171 →institutional constraints, but not entirely in ways expected. Both interaction terms of strategic alignment with regime type and with media pluralism predict outside lobbying to a statistically significant degree. This gives a more nuanced picture of when and why groups’ alignments become important in their decision to outside lobby. To interpret these interactions, figure 7.1 plots the marginal effects of alignment on outside lobbying, conditional on the extent of media pluralism (left pane) and regime type (right pane). The dots in each pane represent point estimate for the conditional marginal effect, with 95 percent confidence intervals. For the left pane, the predictor was fixed at 40, representing low media pluralism (roughly the level of Azerbaijan) and 85 (high media pluralism, such as in Portugal). As the graph shows, the effect of alignment differs depending on macroinstitutional settings. Recall that increases on the alignment variable represent a move closer to the opposition than the government. Being close to the opposition is associated with less outside lobbying where media are repressed, with a conditional marginal effect (CME) of −0.40 (95% CIs[-0.68,-0.11]), and with more outside lobbying where media are free (CME = 0.53[0.20,0.86]). Substantively, this means that a move from “cooperative” to “very cooperative” in a group’s relationship with the opposition is linked to an increased intensity of outside lobbying of 0.53 in a pluralistic media environment, and a decrease of 0.40 in a repressed media environment. As the maximum of relative outside lobbying is 3.2, this constitutes quite a significant impact.
The relationship is reversed for regime type (right pane). Here opposition alignment has a positive effect in autocracies (CME = 0.27[0.09, 0.45]), but a not statistically significant one in democracies (CME = −0.11[-0.33,0.11]). This is counter to expectations and is surprising, given that media pluralism is on average higher in democracies (m = 66 on RSF’s 0–100 scale, SD = 8.2) than in autocracies (m = 59, SD = 10.5), t(273) = −6.53, p < 0.001. Having said that, there are a number of autocracies in the data set with free media environments, for instance Burkina Faso or Papua New Guinea (both with media pluralism = 77), and some democracies with very adverse media environments, for example Mexico (51) or the Philippines (56). It therefore makes sense that media pluralism conditions the effect of alignment regardless of regime type. Concerning the unexpected interaction of alignment and regime type, however, this may speak to the fact that autocracies, as other chapters in this volume also show, tend to shut inside routes of access to anyone seen as being too close to the opposition. Advocacy groups deciding how to lobby the autocrat are therefore pushed toward outside strategies as their primary option.
Figure 7.1. Conditional Effects of Alignment on Outside Lobbying
Note: Based on M3 (Table 7.1), other variables held constant at mean, 95% confidence interval. N=267 groups
Follow for extended description
Page 172 →Fourth, to explore this last point further, model M4 subsets the data for authoritarian regimes only, reducing the observations to 133 and removing the interaction between alignment and regime type. There are a few interesting observations. The fit of the model is further increased, and opposition autonomy remains significant. Strikingly, international linkage and group resources do not predict outside lobbying in this subset of the data. Competition among advocacy groups, however, does become a significant predictor. This chimes with findings elsewhere in this volume that limited agenda space and funding sources foster competition among groups rather than cooperation (e.g., chapters 4 or 11). This competition drives groups toward media strategies as a way of attracting members and attention. In democracies, even in the face of stiff competition, groups may find other sources to maintain.
Page 173 →As model M4 shows, the interaction term of media pluralism and alignment remains significant. To interpret this interaction in substantive terms, figure 7.2 plots the predicted score of outside lobbying, depending on the degree of media pluralism in an autocracy and a group’s alignment. The full line depicts the prediction for advocacy groups aligned more strongly with the government, with the “alignment” variable held at −2. The dashed line represents groups closer to the opposition (alignment = 2). The x-axis varies the degree of media pluralism. The graph shows that moving from low to high media pluralism is associated with an increase of outside lobbying from −0.36 to 0.89 for opposition-aligned groups, but a decrease from 0.07 to −1.01 for government-aligned ones. These are both quite dramatic predicted changes of more than one standard deviation. The substantive interpretation confirms the expectation of hypothesis H3b that advocacy groups in autocracies are more prone to lobby via the media where the media arena is more open and if they are aligned with the opposition. For government-aligned groups, the relationship is reversed. The freer the media, the less they use them. This predicted difference, however, is not significant, at the 95 percent level. In restricted media environments, having close allies among either the opposition or the government does not significantly correlate with lobbying strategy. Interpreted the other way around, a shift in the relationship between a group and the opposition from “very conflictual” to “very cooperative” is associated with an increase in outside lobbying of about two standard deviations in pluralistic media systems, but it makes no difference in closed ones.
Overall, the evidence is only consistent with hypothesis H3b. Hypotheses H1 and H2a and H2b could not be supported, while results go exactly counter to the expectations of hypothesis H3a. All these findings hold when controlling for common explanations of outside lobbying such as resources or international linkage. It is noteworthy, however, that both of these latter factors are significant in the models and show the “right” direction. On the other hand, other factors expected to correlate with outside lobbying, such as issue salience and member orientation, are not significant predictors. Beyond the argument presented in this chapter, this result draws into question the explanatory power of some well-established mechanisms connecting group and issue characteristics to the decision to use the media. It suggests that these factors may be important only in liberal democracies but not when one broadens the scope of inquiry.
Figure 7.2. Predicting Outside Lobbying in Autocracies
Note: Based on M4 (Table 7.1), other variables held constant at mean, 95% prediction intervals. N = 133 groups.
Page 174 →Conclusion
In this chapter, I investigated the drivers of outside lobbying among human rights groups active in the issue space of electoral reform. Despite a wealth of research in interest group studies and in comparative authoritarianism, we know little about how groups calibrate their lobbying tactics under a range of political regimes and in different media systems. I argued that we need to take into account (a) the different demands advocacy groups face from important allies, namely the political opposition, and (b) macroinstitutional factors, specifically whether politicians are motivated to listen to public opinion through free and fair elections (i.e., a democratic regime) and whether media pluralism exist.
I tested the proposition that strategic alignment, democracy, and media pluralism bolster incentives to go public with data on electoral reform advocacy groups in eighty-five countries. The results revealed that outside lobbying, counter to expectations, is equally prevalent among human rights groups in autocracies and in democracies. The findings only partially supported a priori expectations derived from theoretical arguments of organizational maintenance and influence production. Close ties to the opposition predict stronger outside lobbying under authoritarianism,Page 175 → but not in democracies, and only in pluralistic media environments, but not in closed ones. This seemingly contradictory finding suggests that there are push and pull factors nudging oppositional advocates toward media-centric strategies. Lack of inside access in authoritarian contexts pushes groups toward outside lobbying, whereas a more pluralistic media system pulls them in the same direction. While autocracies provide, on average, less media pluralism than democracies, the highest likelihood of outside strategies is therefore ironically in autocracies with a moderately free media. This confirms that smart autocrats may be well-advised to allow a degree of media pluralism, as this stimulates the funneling of societal information to the regime via the media arena (Lorentzen 2014).
There are some important limitations to this study. Results may not travel to other types of organized interests or other policy areas. As a subtype of human rights groups, electoral reform advocates routinely attribute blame to the government, and may even threaten the regime’s legitimacy in more authoritarian contexts. Therefore, the high importance of opposition alignment may be unique to these groups. In addition, the proposed theory does not travel easily to one-party autocracies where a political opposition in form of a party or parties does not exist. In such circumstances, advocates’ alignment with diverse intraregime factions may become more important, as Li finds in China (see chapter 8). Yet the results shown here are still representative for election advocacy groups at-large, precisely because they are least prevalent in closed autocracies (which the majority of single-party regimes are) as well as in liberal democracies. The sample thus depicts the actual distribution of such groups faithfully. And so, since election watchdogs predominantly lobby in the slightly more open context of electoral (rather than closed) autocracies—implying multiparty competition, albeit on an unfair playing field—the argument about opposition alignment remains salient. Finally, the analysis in this chapter does not say anything about the relative prevalence of outside lobbying compared to inside strategies directly targeted at lawmakers or bureaucrats. Further research should look into whether alignment also structures the choice to engage in inside lobbying, as Khoo and Leong explore in chapter 9.
Keeping in mind these limitations, the study contributes to several existing research programs, drawing strength from its globally comparative design. First, the findings shed light on lobbying in nondemocracies. The very fact that advocacy groups choose the outside strategy in seemingly adverse environments raises questions about our common understanding of autocratic responsiveness. In the absence of fair elections as Page 176 →the conduit for responsiveness, these advocates at the very least think that media attention will not harm them, especially if they have allies among the political opposition. On the other hand, it may also be true that outside lobbying provides important informational signals to an autocratic ruler, who faces problems of monitoring both public sentiment and policy implementation. As discussed in the concluding chapter, we identify three factors that shape all stages of influence production under authoritarianism: access to policy making, information demands, and social control. In this analysis, I find that access to policy makers and information demands interact to create strategies that more closely match those found in democracies, such that groups without policy access rely more heavily on media strategies. But the data do not allow direct empirical analysis of social control factors, namely parsing out policy red lines or differential repression. The case studies in the following chapters facilitate such analysis of cost-benefit perception by advocacy groups.
Second, for studies of interest groups, the lesson that social-institutional variation matters is one of significance. Outside lobbying is more likely in countries where a relatively open media arena provides opportunity to mobilize bystanding publics, a factor taken for granted in existing interest group research. It is worth noting that such media “pluralism” may be a product of advocacy groups themselves altering their ecology by shifting communications to the online sphere. This is, for instance, suggested by the analyses of environmental advocacy in Cambodia (chapter 5) and women’s rights groups in Turkey (chapter 6). Another important takeaway for the wider research program is that established explanations of outside lobbying—namely member orientation and issue salience—may not travel well beyond established democracies.
Third, there are ramifications for research into the diffusion of human rights norms. The findings add nuance to the “boomerang” model of norm diffusion, in which domestic groups circumvent repression by appealing to international allies and transnational advocates (Keck and Sikkink 1998). This chapter’s findings raise questions about the workings of the boomerang model for advocates under authoritarianism, a theme also explored in chapter 5, since international linkages of groups predict outside lobbying in the sample at large but not in the subset of autocracies. This exemplifies the value of taking the methodological lens of interest group and agenda-setting studies and applying it to this subfield in international relations.
Page 177 →Notes
1. These groups are nonstate, nonprofit, nonpartisan, and nonmedia organizations that witness and document electoral malpractice in their own country and/or advocate for legislative or procedural changes in the way elections are conducted (Grömping 2017). They are human rights groups in the sense that they make recourse to political rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Right, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and other global conventions (Davis-Roberts and Carroll 2010).
2. Defined here as electoral conduct adhering to international norms applying universally to all countries and throughout the whole electoral cycle (Norris 2013, 564).
3. In the human rights context, these tactics are also often discussed under the rubric “information politics” rather than outside lobbying (Ramos, Ron, and Thoms 2007; Thrall, Stecula, and Sweet 2014).
4. See Grömping 2019.
5. Table A.7.1 in the appendix shows results of the PCA and the factor loadings after rotation.
7. Despite the nested nature of the data, simple OLS regression is suggested by an interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of only 0.09. All models were replicated with country random effects, substantiating the same results.
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