Online - Networks of Challengers in Food Policy : A comparative Study of Structures and

In our study we assume that the latency of food safety policy making renders the issue an ideal case to study the mobilization by challenger organization through the Internet. By analyzing online issue networks in the field of food safety in the UK, the US, Germany and Switzerland we seek to reveal food safety issue networks in the Internet and determine the dominant actors and coalitions. We describe how do they relate to each other in their communication and what the role of traditional media is in the mobilization of food safety contention. In our study we compare the structure of food safety networks in pluralist and corporatist democracy, as we take Germany and Switzerland as examples of corporatist systems while the UK and the US in contrast stand for pluralist systems. Our empirical findings relate to hyperlink networks which we construct on the basis of webcrawls with the Issuecrawler, a hyperlink crawling software. The findings are instructive with respect to the role of the Internet in agenda building of food safety, as in countries where the issue is confined into national political interest groups arrangements the mobilization is triggered only by expert and transnational communication from outside. In countries where challengers do not find support within national policy arrangements their Internet communication uses the traditional media to bring food safety questions onto the public agenda.