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

Many bills, addressing many public problems, demand the attention of Congress; only a few get it. Given limited time and resources, congressional agenda-setters must determine which bills to grant scarce agenda space, and which to neglect. How do they make this determination? I examine interest group influence on decisions to grant bills committee consideration, often both the critical legislative winnowing point and the focus of lobbying efforts. Little existing scholarship on interest group lobbying examines the effect of lobbying on legislative advancement, and what does emphasizes the role of organizational numbers and resources (particularly, campaign contributions) as sources of interest group influence. By contrast, I argue that committee agenda-setters have incentives to grant consideration to bills supported by organizations representing a diverse set of industries, social causes and other interests. Analyzing new data from interest group positions on over 4700 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress between 2005 and 2014, I find that bills supported by such interest diverse coalitions are more likely to attain committee markup, especially for majority-party sponsored bills and those introduced during divided government. This suggests that lobbying influences legislative advancement by helping committee agenda-setters predict bill viability in later legislative stages. In doing so, it "biases" legislative advancement in favor of bills supported by diverse interests.