Interest Representation during the Corona Virus Crisis (InterCov Project)
The Corona virus crisis has exerted a major social and economic shock in countries worldwide. Both the pandemic itself, as well as the crisis management policies resulting from it, could entail big changes for the representation of different social and economic interests in public policy. The Interest Representation during the Coronavirus Crisis (InterCov) Project was initiated in May 2020 with the aim to assess these effects of Covid-19 on interest representation and political advocacy.
How did interest groups and companies represent their political interests during the Coronavirus crisis? How has this crisis affected their ability to mobilise, and express their views and needs to decision-makers?
Our project set out to address such questions by collecting data across active interest groups and companies in ten polities in Europe, namely in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and at the European Union (EU)-level. From early June to mid-July 2020, a first online survey was conducted among ca. 6.000 organisations and large firms.
Junk, W.M., M., Crepaz, M., Hanegraaff, J., Berkhout, E., Aizenberg (2020). Interest Representation during the Corona Virus Crisis: Results from the European Union and Nine European Countries. Summary Report
This blog post on 3Streams also summarises some of our initial findings.
Junk, W.M. and M. Crepaz (2020) New evidence shows Coronavirus crushed citizen groups across Europe. #Streams on medium.
For an overview of all survey questions, please see our general codebook:
Junk, W.M., M., Crepaz, M., Hanegraaff, J., Berkhout, E., Aizenberg (2020). InterCov Project: Online Survey on Interest Representation during Covid-19. Edition : June – July 2020.
In the future, other project outcomes will be made available here and other research outlets by the project team.
Project team:
Wiebke Marie Junk, Assistant Professor, University of Copenhagen
Michele Crepaz, Assistant Professor, NUI Galway
Marcel Hanegraaff, Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam
Joost Berkhout, Associate Professor, University of Amsterdam
Ellis Aizenberg, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Amsterdam