Public Interest Advocacy

The project, led by Professor Darren Halpin, aims to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of public interest advocacy, via the media, in elevating responsiveness of elected political elites. The project expects to generate new knowledge about how both the advocacy and media agendas are set, examine the way elected elites access and ingest the news media, and the conditions under which advocacy group access to the news changes political priorities. We will parse media data (statements by advocacy groups in the legacy news media), statements by advocacy groups (budget submissions), and statements by politicians (in Hansard), and to categorise these text corpora using large language models. The project is funded by ARC Discovery Project award DP220100050.