How do policy entrepreneurs–lobbyists, legislators, staffers, and activists–navigate political institutions and systemic forces like polarization? How do their backgrounds, stakeholders, priorities, and coalitions affect the strategies by which they do so? Under what conditions do they affect legislative agendas, processes, and outcomes?
Publications
Lobbying Venue Selection Under Separation of Powers and Resource Constraints (with LaGina Gause). Accepted, Interest Groups and Advocacy Both Congress and Executive branch agencies can change policy, so interest groups must consider which of these venues to lobby on a given issue. Prior work has examined how group resources and types shape venue strategies. Here, we argue that factors in the political environment–venues’ issue priorities and the power of groups’ allies in a venue– influence how groups with different resource constraints adopt venue strategies. Examining over one million issue-level lobbying disclosures filed between 2008 and 2016, we find that resource-constrained groups strategically lobby the venue(s) controlled by partisan allies and respond to the government’s and public’s issue priorities. Meanwhile, high-resource groups more often lobby all venues relevant to their issues regardless of the political environment. Our findings suggest that separation of powers provides high-resource groups more venues to lobby for favored policies. Conversely, low-resource groups strategically only lobby venue(s) they have the potential to influence.
“Pandemic Pluralism: Legislator Championing of Organized Interests in Response to COVID-19” (with Jesse Crosson and Alexander Furnas), Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, Vol. 2: No. 1 (January 2021), pp 23-41. The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a system-wide economic downturn disrupting virtually every conceivable economic interest. Which interests do legislators publicly champion during such crises? Here, we examine mentions of particular industries across thousands of press releases issued by members of Congress during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (January to June 2020). We show that members consistently emphasized interests significant to their constituency and party network, but less so their direct campaign contributors or ideological allies. This suggests that members believe that they must be seen as good district representatives and party stewards even when national crises could justifiably induce them to favor any number of interests.
“Polarized Pluralism: Organizational Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System” (with Jesse Crosson & Alexander Furnas), American Political Science Review 114, no. 4 (November 2020): 1117-1137. Ungated version here. Replication data here. 2019 Best Paper Award from the section on Political Organizations and Parties of the American Political Science Association. For decades, critics of pluralism have argued that the American interest group system exhibits a significantly biased distribution of policy preferences. We evaluate this argument by measuring groups’ revealed preferences directly, developing a set of ideal point estimates, IGscores, for over 2,600 interest groups and 950 members of Congress on a common scale. Analyses of the scores uncover significant heterogeneity in the interest group system, with little conservative skew and notable inter-party differences in preference correspondence between legislators and ideologically similar groups. Conservative bias and homogeneity reappear, however, when weighting IGscores by groups’ campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. These findings suggest that bias among interest groups depends on the extent to which activities like contributions and lobbying influence policymakers’ perceptions about the preferences of organized interests.
“Large-N Bill Positions Data from MapLight.org: What Can We Learn from Interest Groups’ Publicly Observable Bill Positions?” (with Jesse Crosson & Alexander Furnas), Interest Groups & Advocacy 9 (April 2020): 342–360. The transparency organization MapLight records instances of organizations taking positions for and against legislation in Congress. The dataset comprises some 130,000 such positions taken on thousands of bills between the 109th and 115th Congresses (2005-2018). The depth and breadth of these data potentially give them wide applicability for answering questions about interest group behavior and influence as well as legislative politics more broadly. However, the coverage and content of the data are affected by aspects of MapLight’s research process. This article introduces the MapLight dataset and its potential uses, examines issues related to sampling and other aspects of MapLight’s research process, and explains how scholars can address these to make appropriate use of the data.
“How Experienced Legislative Staff Contribute to Effective Lawmaking” (with Jesse Crosson, Craig Volden, & Alan Wiseman). in Congress Overwhelmed: The Decline in Congressional Capacity and Prospects for Reform, University of Chicago Press. 2020. Working paper version here. Members of Congress seek to allocate their scarce staff resources carefully, given their multiple, sometimes competing, objectives. Using data on House members’ staff allocations from 1994 to 2013, we demonstrate that legislators advance more (and more significant) legislation when they retain a more experienced legislative staff. This benefit, however, accrues mostly to committee chairs, whose institutional privileges allow them to leverage experienced staff, and to the most junior legislators, whose inexperience can be best supplemented by experienced aides. Finally, we show that legislators do not generally benefit from large legislative staffs, but rather from having individual legislative staffers with high levels of experience. This finding suggests that a targeted strategy to retain the most experienced legislative staff in Congress may pay the greatest dividends in regards to lawmaking.
“Prioritized Interests: Diverse Interest Group Coalitions and Congressional Committee Agenda-Setting.” Journal of Politics 82, no. 1 (January 2020): 225-240. Ungated version here. For most congressional legislation, committee consideration is the first and most drastic winnowing point. Organized interest groups try to influence this winnowing. Many have suggested such influence arises from organizational resources. I offer an alternative view based on the need of policy-motivated committee agenda setters to assess the viability of bills before granting them consideration. Such needs incentivize agenda setters to favor legislation supported by organizations representing diverse industries, causes, and other interests. Analyzing new data on organizations’ positions on over 4,700 bills introduced between 2005 and 2014, I show that committee consideration favors such “interest diverse” coalitions, not coalitions that are large but homogeneous or that give high levels of campaign contributions. These associations are stronger when viability information is more valuable, for majority-party bills and bills introduced during divided government. This suggests that lobbying helps agenda setters identify, and promote, legislation likely to garner widespread and diverse support.
“Coalition Portfolios and Interest Group Influence over the Policy Process” (with Michael T. Heaney) 2013. Interest Groups & Advocacy 2(3): 251–277. Ungated version here. Working together in coalition is one of the most common tactics that interest groups use to advance their interests in the policy process. While groups often participate in more than one coalition at a time, we know little about the implications of these coalition portfolios for advocacy effectiveness. We argue that the ability to make connections is important in advocacy efforts, and thus organizations whose coalition portfolio gives them high betweenness–the tendency to uniquely connect other disparate actors in the lobbying network–is a potential source of influence. We test these expectations by examining interest group coalitions advocating during the legislative enactment and bureaucratic implementation of the Medicare Modernization Act, using data on coalition participation from personal interviews with representatives of 102 interest groups active on the bill. We find that groups’ gaining reputational influence as the bill moved from enactment to implementation is strongly associated with changes in their betweenness centrality in the lobbying coalition network.
Book Project
Taking Sides: Party Competition, Interest Group Strategy, and the Polarization of American Pluralism (with Jesse Crosson and Alexander Furnas)
ToC and Chapter Summaries
Chapter 2 draft
Chapter 5 draft
Given their usual depiction as parochial and pragmatic policy-seekers, our findings in “Polarized Pluralism” (APSR, 2020) regarding the polarization of modern-day interest groups are puzzling. Particularly in an era wherein predicting party control of government is especially difficult, why would policy-motivated interests seemingly align themselves with just one political party? At the same time, interest groups are increasingly driven to take positions on a wider range of issues that seem outside of their core interests-e.g., a gun rights organization taking positions on tax bills, or an environmental group taking positions on non-environmental civil rights issues. In this book, we argue that these trends are related to one another. To do so, we draw on large-scale data collection of interest group position-taking over time and analyze these data using cutting-edge computational methods. Through a series of empirical exercises, we test a new theory of interest group partisanship, wherein we argue that the rise of insecure partisan majorities in Congress has led lawmakers to look for signals of allegiance to party.
Working Papers
Please contact for latest draft.
Drawing Better Lawmakers: Redistricting Institutions and Legislative Entrepreneurship As of 2022, over a fifth of members of the U.S. House of Representatives were elected from a district drawn by an independent redistricting commission (IRC). IRCs are usually advocated on the promise that they will mitigate partisan gerrymandering, but evidence that they make elections more competitive or winners less partisan is mixed. This may be because representatives adapt to new redistricting methods by changing their legislative behavior. I argue that incumbent “holdovers” from the pre-IRC period deemphasize lawmaking, while vulnerable post-IRC “replacements” pursue early-stage lawmaking that they can credibly claim personal credit for. Examining data on the House between 1973 and 2020, I find evidence of these differences, and show that they arise from diverging legislative strategies. Together, these findings suggest that IRCs encourage elected representatives to focus on building or maintaining district support.
Pivots or Partisans? Proposal-Making Strategy and Status Quo Selection in Congress (with Jesse Crosson & Alexander Furnas) Lawmakers vary considerably in how effectively they advance their priorities through Congress. However, the actual proposal-writing strategies undergirding these differences have remained largely unexplored due to measurement and methodological difficulties, including small samples, costly data requirements, and strong theoretical assumptions. In this paper, we overcome these obstacles and analyze the proposal strategies of effective lawmakers directly, using original measures of the spatial locations of congressional bill proposals and status quos generated by jointly scaling cosponsorship, roll-call, and interest group position-taking data for 1,007 bills from the 110th – 114th Congresses. Because interest groups take positions on bills before they receive votes, our measures cover many bills that die in committee, permitting needed comparisons between successful and unsuccessful bills. We demonstrate that legislative advancement favors moderate proposals over partisan ones, and that effective lawmakers are those who make proposals closer to the median even at the expense of their preferred policy.
The Multiplicity of Factions: Multi-Dimensional Ideal Points for Interest Groups & Members of Congress (with Kevin McAlister, Jesse M. Crosson, and Alexander C. Furnas)
White Paper at New America
America’s two-party system and related political institutions generally collapse conflict toward a single left-right dimension. While previous work underscored how such forces belie actual latent disagreement across multiple preference dimensions, more recent methodological improvements and new data allow for greater analysis of both the optimal number of dimensions as well as the ideal points of individual actors on each dimension. We apply these methods to a dataset of legislators’ roll-call votes and interest groups’ publicly-observable positions on bills. Doing so demonstrates that in addition to the classic left vs. right dimension, American national political conflict is optimally-characterized by dimensions concerning agriculture, conservation and development, and industry versus privacy. Characterizing these dimensions and the actors that exemplify them informs speculation about potential latent factions in American politics that might be “released” if American political institutions were reformed to better encourage multiparty-ism.
Ongoing Projects
Access Through the Revolving Door (with Richard Hall)
What Drives Legislative Specialization? (with Hye Young You, Craig Volden, and Alan Wiseman)
Legislative Construction and Interest Group Conflict Expansion