Analyzing European Media Policy: Stakeholders and Advocacy Coalitions

Analyzing European media policy: Stakeholders and advocacy coalitions

Hilde Van den Bulck and Karen Donders

Media Policy: From Outcome Analysis to Process Analysis

Media policy analysis seeks to “examine the ways in which policies in the field of communication are generated and implemented, as well as their repercussions or implications for the field of communication as a whole” (Hansen et al., 1998, p. 67). Most critical academic media policy research is conducted ex post, tracing how certain policy outcomes came about, why certain policy outcomes rather than others became dominant, what parties were involved in the decisionmaking process, and how power was distributed amongst them (Freedman, 2008; Fischer, 2003). As such, a rich tradition of research into media policy has developed, including analysis of media policies at the level of the European Union (EU).

Indeed, ever since the EU (at the time the European Community) – and especially the European Commission (EC) – started taking an interest in media in the 1980s, an extensive literature developed on the specifics of EU media policy and the impact on the media landscape in its Member States (see the introduction in this book). Scholars working in this area show an in-depth understanding of particular policy outcomes and a detailed knowledge of the legal and factual eventsleading up to them, but they do not often provide a systematic analysis of the actual process of EU media policy making as such. What is more, while scholars contextualize policy decisions and the implications hereof in conceptual-theoretical models about the relationship between media, society and the state, less attention is paid to (the application of) models and tools in other academic disciplines such as political sciences that can help explain EU decision making in the area of media.

This is where this chapter wants to contribute by providing an analytical framework that can be used as a tool to analyze and better understand this complex process of EU media policy making. To this end, the chapter first discusses stakeholder analysis – often implicitly applied in media policy research – as a preliminary inroad into identifying relevant actors, their arguments and logic, their visibility and prominence in the policy process. Yet such a focus on actors cannot fully explain the entire process through which policies come about. Therefore this chapter introduces Sabatier’s (Sabatier Jenkins-Smith, 1993) Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and analyses how (and to what extent) this model can provide a framework to deal with the specifics of EU media policy making structures and mechanisms. In doing so, we will evaluate the usefulness of the model tounderstand the allocation of power in the policy process.

Throughout, conceptual issues are illustrated with recent EU media policy developments in the area of public service broadcasting. The chapter will not provide new insight into the actual EU policy with regard to public service broadcasting (see chapter by Donders Moe). A rich and detailed literature in this area already exists. Instead, it will provide conceptual tools for a better understanding of the complex and multi-layered EU media policy process that lies behind these policy outcomes.

Stakeholders in the EU Policy Arena

Stakeholder analysis: itinerary, concepts and tools

Although rarely identified as such, much of the work dealing with EU media policy is in fact a form of stakeholder analysis, a policy analysis model with a considerable tradition in other fields of enquiry, including business management (e.g. Mitchell et al., 1997), health care (e.g. Brugha Varvasovsky, 2000), and development and environmental studies (e.g. Prell et al., 2009). Even though “each [policy] sector poses its own problems, sets its own constraints, and generates its own brand of conflicts” (Freeman, 1985, p. 469), and although institutions and loci of power to influence policy outcomes differ across sectors (Howlett, 2004), these studies provide conceptual tools applicable to and useful in the field of EU media policy.

Stakeholder analysis considers a “policy decision the result of a process characterised by formulation of views and interests, expressed by actors or stakeholders that adhere to a certain logic and that engage in debate and work towards a policy decision on relevant forums” (Van den Bulck, 2012, p. 219). Understanding the media policy process by means of stakeholder analysis involves a number of analytical steps (see Van den Bulck, 2012). It starts from a broad understanding of the main structures and processes of and policy venues involved in decision-making, in this case in the EU. It next requires the identification of all relevant stakeholders: i.e. individuals, groups, organizations and institutions with a vested interest in a particular policy issue or its outcome. In the field of media policy these can include:

-national (government, parliament, regional entities, etc.) and transnational (European Commission, distinct Directorate Generals, European Parliament, Council of Ministers, etc.) governmental bodies;

-politicians (e.g. former Belgian prime minister Dehaene and former German chancellor Kohl pushing for the adoption of the Amsterdam Protocol in 1997, cf. supra);

-regulatory institutions (European courts, media regulators and National Competition Authorities);

-media interest groups (like the Association of Commercial Television, the European Broadcasting Union, and the European Publishers Council);

-media companies (including multinationals and smaller undertakings);and

-citizens and other representatives of civil society.

Identifying stakeholders is usually a dynamic, iterative process, as unexpected parties may surface while analyzing and collecting data on developing European media policies (e.g. civil society groups claiming an increasingly important role in policy initiatives on piracy), as well as during data collection and analysis. Interestingly, the category of stakeholders does not entirely overlap with that of policy actors. Certain stakeholders with a distinct interest in a certain outcome may not actually take part in the policy process (with large sections of media audiences as a typical example), while policy actors with no explicit stake such as academics and civil servants can considerably influence the outcome of the process.

Once identified, stakeholders can be characterized on the basis of their attitude towards the policy issue at hand, and of the main logic they adhere to. The latter relates to the perception of the situation and the structure of goals and means in a certain situation (Van den Bulck, 2008). Within the field of (European) media policy, arguments are formulated mainly within a technological, economic, political, and/or cultural logic. Two stakeholders can be in favour of a certain policy outcome but can argue this on the basis of a different logic, while a shared logic not necessarily results in the same policy preference. For example, two companies proposing a merger in the area of pay-television will argue for approval by the European Commission (in case of a European interest) or National Competition Authority on the basis of their own, profit-seeking interests. A Member State might lobby in favour of approval seeking to further the emergence of a ‘national champion,’ being able to fight competition from other Member States or even countries external to the EU. In the alternative, two Member States can share their support for domestic children’s programming with one Member State introducing a prohibition of advertising before and after children’s programming, while the other one suppresses such a prohibition as it wants to avoid undermining the competitiveness of its own domestic providers of children’s content.

The approach to combine actor positions with gaining an insight in underlying logics fits with a recent trend in media policy studies advocating for a focus on the role of ideas. Incorporating such an ‘ideational’ view can overcome a toostrong focus onrealpolitik and what stakeholders want by also looking at “their worldviews, values and cognitive frames or intellectual paradigms—which may themselves shape actors” interests’ (Parker Parenta, 2008, p. 4). It further allows to take into account non-rational, rather symbolic, motives, that are often present in EU media policy debates.

Stakeholders in EU public service broadcasting policy making

Decision making at the EU level is a complex affair. In the most general sense, its key policy actors are the national governments of the – currently 27 – Member States and the EU supranational political institutions, the European Parliament and the European Commission. In decisions of “history making proportions” (Warleigh-Lack Drachenberg, 2012, p. 221) Member State governments have allmeaningful power, negotiating e.g. in the Council of Ministers. In other policymaking, including with regard to public service broadcasting, the key supranational actor is the European Commission whose main stake is to make sure Member States comply with the single market and State aid rules. The latter particularly holds for the position of public broadcasters in national media markets, making not just the European Commission’s Directorate General Communication Networks, Content and Technology (DG Connect, formerly Information Society and Media) and the DG for Education and Culture, but even more so DG Competition key actors in public service broadcasting policy making (Donders Pauwels, 2010). The European Court of Justice, finally, cannot initiate policy but can nevertheless as a court of appeal be considered a policy maker (Harcourt, 2005). In fact, the General Court (ex Court of First Instance) has been a very important actor in driving European Commission action in the field of public service broadcasting. Answering to private sector complaints on the lack of action of the European Commission in the area of State aid to public broadcasters, the General Court ruled in three consecutive occasions that the European Commission failed to act. Hence, it instigated European Commission action in this domain (see Donders, 2012).

Four– related – characteristics of the EU media policy making system strongly impact on the number of policy actors that come into play. The first is its multi-level governance transnational nature together with its large scale and complexity all of which result in a wide range of possible actors involved.This is enhanced, second, by the institutionalized position of interest groups in EU policy making. They are crucial in providing the necessary expertise in terms of information and ideas, and thus “support the output legitimacy of EU public policy” (Carboni, 2006; p. 6). As a result, the European Commission allows and encourages – e.g. through consultation rounds–a great many policy actors and stakeholders to be part of media policy making, including in the field of public service broadcasting, film support, etc. Thirdly, the symbolic nature of certain EU media policy issues can add to the number of, in particular, political stakeholders that want to participate in discussions. Public service broadcasting, for example, has a highly symbolic position within Europe, provoking many politicians to ask parliamentary questions in their home parliaments, in the European Parliament, or send letters to the European Commissioner for Competition. Fourthly, the multi-faceted (i.e. cultural and economic) nature of media makes EU media policy a domain that is claimed by many stakeholders.

Public service broadcasting policy making at the European level has thus become a multi-stakeholder affair with, next to the EU institutions, a wide range of actors and stakeholders involved in the process (both invited and unsolicited), including public and private broadcasters, radio operators, film producers and distributors, newspaper publishers, advertisers, cable and satellite operations, telecom companies and their respective sectoral organizations, trade unions, religious groups and many other civil society organizations and individuals, cultural and other research institutes and academic and other experts (Commission Staff working paper, s.n.; Van den Bulck, 2008; Donders Pauwels, 2010).

Some of the most active stakeholders that scholars (cf. Bardoel, 2009; Donders Pauwels, 2008; Pauwels De Vinck, 2007; Soltész, 2010) have identified in EU public broadcasting policy making in the past decade, are public broadcasters’ main competitors, commercial broadcasters and newspaper publishers. While many European states have enabled public broadcasters a strong market position and, for reasons of technological nationalism, have given them a leading role in digitization and the development of new media technologies (Smith Steemers, 2007; Van den Bulck, 2007), commercial stakeholders have protested the wide scope of activities, the position of public broadcastersvis à vis technological developments and new media services, and the market distortion effect of public broadcasters funding, adhering mainly to an economic logic. In the past decade many complaints launched by these key stakeholders were filed with the European Commission, indicating their visibility and significance. As the extensive literature on this topic indicates, these stakeholders’ attempts seem to have contributed successfully to the recent changes in the European Commission’s public service broadcasting policy resulting in the stipulations in the renewed 2009 Broadcast Communication outlined above, with tighter definitions of the public broadcasting remit in many national legislations and the introduction of ex ante tests for significantly new services as the main outcomes (Ridinger, 2009; Soltész, 2010; Tosics et al., 2008; Donders Moe, 2011).

Conceptual Blind Spots in Stakeholder Analysis

Although stakeholder analysis is essential to understand how particular media policies take shape, it has a number of shortcomings, resulting in blind spots in policy process mapping. First, it tends to be inspired by an ‘institutional’ view of the media policy process, focusing on formal and visible points of decision-making (e.g. the European Commission) and on institutional arrangements (Parker Parenta, 2008). This may result in a failure to identify key non-institutional and informal policy-making venues, where stakeholders work outside of ‘official’ policy channels (Freedman, 2008; Kingdon, 1995; Lindquist, 2001, p. 13).

This may lead, second, to an inability to detect all relevant actors and stakeholders that were instrumental in a particular policy outcome. This may include less visible but potentially influential stakeholders or civil servants and other actors that may not have a direct stake in but nevertheless exert a considerable influence on the policymaking process (Van den Bulck, 2008). There is a need for a more complex view of all those involved in the policy process, their positions and interrelations. Third, as most stakeholder analyses focus on a specific case or issue, they quickly become ‘outdated’ as actors and their arguments and logics are likely to shift from one case to the next. This, according to Weible (2007), makes it difficult to get a long term, systematic stakeholder map. There is also a need for “a wider scope, recognizing that stakeholders typically are not concerned with just one policy venue or alternative but with the outcomes of an entire policy subsystem over long periods of time” (Weible,2007, p. 97).

Fourth, there is a need for a better conceptual understanding of the dynamics of the policy process as a means to identify who gets something on the policy agenda, how different stakeholders relate to one another and to key policymakers, and how the decision-making process works formally and informally. Identification of stakeholders and policy actors in itself cannot account for their individual or combined visibility, impact and power nor for the policy processes in which they take part. As argued by Donders and Raats (2012, pp. 14-15)media policy making – like in other areas – remains something of a black box. Their conclusion is based on a discussion of Flemish and Dutch public service broadcasting policy decisions but since EU media policy adds levels of policy making and numbers of actors, the issueis all the more relevant and provides an additional argument to look for a more solid basis for policy process analysis.

The Policy Process: The Advocacy Coalition Framework

From Actors to Process

To overcome these blind spots and fully grasp the complexity of policy making, it is necessary to extend the focus on policy actors with a model that focuses on the policy process: how do the policy decisions come about? John (2003) contends that, regardless of a pluralist consensus, a critical conflict, or a mixed position, the policy process must be considered as complex, involving not just a wide variety of actors and institutions but also a complex web of relations between them and a multitude of sources of causation and feedback.

One potentially useful model is Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s (1993; 1999) Advocacy Coalition Framework. The model considers the policy process as “a competition between coalitions who advocate beliefs about policy, problems and solutions” (Carboni, 2009). While developed in the 1990s within the context of the US political system, Sabatier (1998a) himself indicated that his model in the context of the EU can function as “at least a useful ordering framework for identifying important variables and relationships” (Sabatier, 1998a, p. 120). By the mid 2000s Sabatier and Weibles (2007) showed that one out of three ACF studies deals with Europe, half of which with the EU (e.g. Dudley Richardson, 1999; Radaelli, 1999). More recently, the model has been applied to EU policy making areas including energy (Engel, 2007), health (Carboni, 2009) and immigration (Carammia, 2009), to name but a few. This, combined with the characteristics of EU policy making identified above, heightens the likely applicability of EU policy in the field of EU media policy.

Policy Subsystems, Advocacy Coalitions and Belief Systems

The ACF assumes that there are sets of core ideas about causation and value in public policy with regards to key policy issues around which subsystems develop. A subsystem groups a range of actors and stakeholders involved in a policy issue and exists when a set of actors, that consider themselves a policy community and that have expertise in a specific area for which there exist specific government agencies, seek to exert their influence on policy making in this area (Sabatier Jenkins-Smith, 1993, p. 124).

While the notion of a subsystem resembles conceptualisations such as Pross’ (1986) policy communities or Haas’ (1992) epistemic communities, Sabatier’s original contribution lies in what he identifies as advocacy coalitions, a notion that links the structural (policy processes and structures) and the individual (beliefs). He considers advocacy coalitions as a range of actors and stakeholders that “both (1) share a set of normative and causal beliefs and (2) engage in a nontrivial degree of coordinated activity over time” (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999, p. 120). These coalitions and the relationships between the ‘members’ can be tight or loose and cut across governmental and non-governmental boundaries as well as across central and peripheral policy actors.