Pressure or power resource? The mediated public in political and economic bargaining

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Oliver Quiring, since 10/2018
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 378742364

In democratic societies, important issues are resolved via political and economic bargaining between collective actors. According to the mediatization paradigm, the media shapes how political and economic actors publicly present claims and decisions. However, we still lack theoretical concepts and empirical evidence explaining if and how the media also influences the bargaining process of decision making itself. It has been argued that the media has no considerable impact on the process of bargaining, since it takes place behind closed doors. Hence, negotiations are supposed to be mainly driven by the political or economic considerations of the actors involved. We, however, assume that political and economic bargaining cannot be properly conceptualized as isolated from (potential) public attention. We propose that (the possibility of) public attention constitutes a framework providing bargaining agents with tactical options, e.g., when going public is utilized as a threat motivating opponents to be more compliant. At the same time, public attention may pressure bargaining agents to perform acts that satisfy the demands of journalists covering the bargaining process. Consequently, we seek to investigate how the media influences both the bargaining agents´ public statements as well as his or her tactical, non-public acting in the immediate bargaining situation. Ultimately, we aim at answering the questions in how far the media imposes pressure on the bargaining actors to adapt to the media logic and how the bargaining agents try to tactically exploit (potential) media coverage to achieve their objectives.In our research project, we will hence propose a theoretical model of mediatized bargaining, which we will empirically validate in a mixed-methods approach. In the course of the project, we will extent the existing body of research by the following aspects: First, we will focus on both the actors´ public and media driven actions (as they are the main focus of mediatization research) as well as on their non-public actions in the immediate situation of bargaining. Additionally, we aim at broadening our understanding of media-induced effects on political and economic bargaining by incorporating the bargaining actors´ cognitive and affective reactions to (potential) media coverage. This allows in a next step to classify the media impact as functional or dysfunctional with respect to the objectives of the bargaining agents. Finally, we aim at incorporating the organizational context of collective actors when analyzing media effects on individual bargaining agents. In order to answer our research questions, we focus on prototypical bargaining constellations, namely the collective bargaining as part of industrial relations. Since industrial relations are shaped by political considerations as well as economic rationalities (i.e., political/economic logic), the results will likely be transferable to political and economic bargaining in general.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Mathias Weber, until 9/2018