Prioritized Interests: Diverse Interest Group Coalitions and Congressional Committee Agenda-Setting (original) (raw)

Lobbying and Congressional Bill Advancement

Interest groups often attempt to influence Congressional legislation through lobbying. We study more than 17,000 bills introduced in both houses of the 106th and 107th congresses, including more than 3,500 associated with reported lobbying. We analyze the determinants of interest group lobbying on particular bills and provide initial tests of the influence of lobbying on the advancement of legislation through committee and floor passage. We find that the incidence and amount of interest group lobbying is associated with majority party sponsorship, wide cosponsorship, and high-profile issues. Lobbying also helps predict whether bills advance through committee and each chamber, independent of congressional factors typically associated with bill advancement.

Predicting Interest Groups Strategies: A Study of Interest Groups and Bills

2002

This paper contributes to our understanding of the puzzle of how interest groups choose their legislative strategies. Literature on interest groups suggests that the resources available to the group limit a group's strategies (see Berry 1977). In addition, later research suggests that the context of legislation also influences the strategies in which groups engage (see Baumgartner and

Who cares about the lobbying agenda?

Executive Summary There has been a long-standing concern about inequality in the representation of interests by organized groups and lobbyists in American politics. The lobbying community in Washington is dominated by corporations, trade associations and professional associations. In Lobbying and Policy Change, Baumgartner and colleagues find that interest group resources are not a very reliable predictor of policy outcomes. This might lead some to conclude that inequality in interest group representation is not a major problem for American democracy. However, we suggest that inequality in interest group representation presents itself at the agenda-setting stage. The public agenda is quite different from the lobbying agenda. That is, the types of issues that are most important to the public differ from the types of issues that lobbyists bring to the attention of government officials. We examine public opinion data in more detail to determine if there is greater congruence between the public agenda and lobbying agenda for certain publics (for example, high SES citizens). We find additional evidence that the lobbying agenda does not reflect the policy priorities of the public. However, we find relatively few differences between the policy priorities of low-income and highincome Americans, suggesting that the lobbying agenda fails to represent the concerns of all broadly defined income groups.

Interest Niches and Policy Bandwagons: Patterns of Interest Group Involvement in National Politics

The Journal of Politics, 2001

Using data from more than 19,000 reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, we analyze the distribution of lobbying on a random sample of 137 issues and find a tremendous skewness. The median issue involved only 15 interest groups, whereas 8 of the issues involved more than 300 interest groups. The top 5% of the issues accounted for more than 45% of the lobbying, whereas the bottom 50% of the issues accounted for less than 3% of the total. This distribution makes generalizations about interest group conflict difficult and helps explain why many scholars have disagreed about the abilities of lobbyists to get what they want. We also confirm and expand upon previous findings regarding the tremendous predominance of business firms in the Washington lobbying population. Political scientists writing since the turn of the century have repeatedly noted the vast proliferation of interest groups in Washington, DC, and in recent decades it has become common to refer to the interest group "explosion" of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Berry 1997; Schlozman and Tierney 1986; Walker 1991). The expansion of the group system is significant to interest group schol

No Representation Without Compensation: The Effect of Interest Groups on Legislators’ Policy Area Focus

Political Research Quarterly, 2022

Interest groups seek to influence parliamentarians' actions by establishing exchange relationships. We scrutinize the role of exchange by investigating how interest groups impact parliamentarians' use of individual parliamentary instruments such as questions, motions, and bills. We utilize a new longitudinal dataset (2000-2015) with 524 Swiss parliamentarians, their 6342 formal ties to interest groups (i.e., board seats), and a variety of 23,750 parliamentary instruments across 15 policy areas. This enables us to show that interest groups systematically relate to parliamentarians' use of parliamentary instruments in the respective policy areas in which they operate-even when parliamentarians' time-invariant (fixed effects) and time-variant personal affinities (occupation, committee membership) to the policy area are accounted for. Personal affinities heavily moderate interest groups' impact on their board members' parliamentary activities. Moreover, once formal ties end, the impact of interest groups also wanes. These findings have implications for our understanding of how interest groups foster representation in legislatures.

The Demand Side of Lobbying: Government Attention and the Mobilization of Organized Interests

2002

Using data from Lobbying Disclosure Reports filed in 1996 through 2000, and linking these data with indicators of federal government attention, government spending, and the size of the business population, we are able to show a strong demand effect of government activity on lobbying. We test a variety of theories about group mobilization and lobbying by analyzing how our measures vary across 56 separate issue areas during the five-year period. Congressional hearings, an indicator of the level of government activity, explains the mobilization of groups more than federal spending or levels of economic activity in the sector. We note the importance of government in defining what is an interest, the growth in the range of government activities over time, and the linkage between the growth in the size and scope of government and the "interest-group explosion" that many other authors have noted. Theories of group mobilization should include a prominent role for the demand effect of government attention.

“Your agenda is our agenda”: State legislators’ perspectives of interest group influence on political decision-making

Journal of Community Practice, 16(2), 201-220, 2008

Political decision makers often argue that their agenda is driven by the needs, values, and wants of constituents, yet little evidence exists documenting the transmission of agendas from the constituents to the decision maker. Interest groups play a crucial role in educating political decision makers about issues and persuading their response; therefore, this study begins to explore the transmission of agendas from interest groups to political decision makers by conducting individual interviews with nine state legislators. The results reveal that state legislators view interest groups as essential to making informed political decisions congruent with the constituents' agenda. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

Interest Groups, Lobbying, and Participation in America: Kenneth M.Goldstein, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999, 158 pages, ISBN 0-521-63047-9 (cloth), US$49.95, ISBN 0-521-63962-X (paper), US$16.95

Journal of Government Information, 2001