The Influence of Business Advocacy in Finnish Employment Relations and Governmental Policies

Whose ideas and interests influence governmental policies and legislation? How do social partners, business advocacy groups and politics interact in Finnish society? These are questions that ADVOCACY aims to answer. The project will focus on analysing the roles of business advocacy groups and social partners in policy processes and their outcomes. The project covers three main areas: 1) Institutional change within Finnish employment relations; 2) Business advocacy organisations' influence on the Finnish welfare state; 3) Debates on the value of feminised work. The research data entails mainly qualitative data, such as interview data, policy documents and social media data. ADVOCACY also uses register data. Methods used are mainly qualitative; discursive, policy-constructivist and multimodal methods, but also entail some quantitative analyses. The study will produce significant empirical results on timely and societally relevant cases, thus have societal impact.