Presidential Position-Taking, Presidential Success, and Interest Group Activity (original) (raw)
2018, Congress & the Presidency
Do lobby groups help the U.S. president achieve policy objectives? Existing research seldom evaluates interest groups and the president in conjunction, and as a result we have little systematic knowledge about how groups respond to presidential actions or whether they assist in realizing the president's policy agenda. Building on existing data obtained through interviews with 776 lobbyists conducted in 1983-84, combined with variables we generate describing issue salience, congressional attention, the political context, and policy adoption, we show that interest groups adjusted their lobbying activity to better reflect the president's voiced preferences about the federal agenda. Despite this strategy, we find that lobby groups had no significant marginal effect on policy adoption when controlling for the overwhelming influence of the president.
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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
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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
By Invitation Only: Controlling Interest Group Access to the Oval Office
American Review of Politics, 2004
Does the exchange model used to explain interest group influence with Congress and the bureaucracy hold leverage over patterns of lobbyist contact with the president? In this paper I argue that there is good reason to believe that it does not. Rather, I argue that the president and his immediate staff often keep interest groups at arm’s length. Instead of being able to acquire face time with senior administration staff to press their own cases, lobbyists are largely granted access only when they are needed to build support for the president’s policy agenda in Congress or with the public. Using data drawn in part from the 1996 filings of interest groups under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, I analyze lobbyists’ contact with the White House to learn what types of circumstances appear to drive contact between interest groups and the president. The evidence suggests that the president-interest group connection is largely determined by the White House based on ideological congruence...
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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.
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Journal of Government Information, 2001