With the publication of this volume, the long-standing critique of interest group research as theory rich and data poor can finally be put to rest. Five coauthors have teamed with (by my count) 52 undergraduate and graduate students for an extraordinarily rich study of policymaking between 1998 and 2002. The extensive trove of data collected (and archived at http://lobby.la.psu.edu/) yields insights that make this book required reading for all students and scholars of American politics.
Assumptions about the influence of lobbyists are rampant in critiques of policymaking. The heavenly chorus of pluralism rings with an upper-class accent, we are frequently reminded. Policy adjusts only incrementally because lawmakers are unable to overcome the influence of vested interests. But are these assumptions borne out empirically? The great knock on studies of policymaking has been that they are either based on case studies, where all sorts of anecdotal evidence can be found to support an interest-group-influence hypothesis, or the data collected are so generic that even basic causal relationships are difficult to establish. What is missing is evidentiary data that capture the particulars found in case study research but are distributed across a diverse enough set of cases to allow for more sophisticated methodological techniques to be employed. Thus, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues, with their small army of assistants, set out to collect case-study-type data in sufficient quantity to allow for aggregate data analysis.
The authors approach their question of “Who wins in Washington?” with a multifaceted research design impressive enough in its breadth to deserve some attention here. To start, they sample from a comprehensive list of House and Senate lobbying disclosure reports to identify a random universe of participants. After initial interviews with their sample population, the authors assemble a list of 98 issues on which each organizational representative had worked most recently. These range from patent extension to chiropractic coverage under Medicare, some very broad and some very specific. Interviewers endeavored to determine the relevant sides of each issue and identify its key players. Separate subsequent interviews were then arranged where possible with representatives from each side of the issue, as well as with a government official working on that issue. All told, the authors interviewed 315 respondents.
Individual interviews anchor the empirical research in this volume, though the authors also effectively mine publicly available information. The net effect of this research approach is an analysis that paints a vivid picture of how advocates interact with one another, but it is made even more robust by the selective deployment of the vast amount of contextual data collected by the authors. Indeed, one of the lasting contributions of this collaboration will be the online database with 258,000 files ready for entrepreneurial researchers to download.
The authors organize their findings around four main observations. First, they note that struggles over policy necessarily involve efforts to change the status quo, which are “statistically uncorrelated to preexisting levels of power or mobilization” (p. 20). That is, bias in the system does not necessarily imply bias in the process of policy change. The second observation involves the multidimensionality of policy impacts. Rarely does a single group feel the impact of a policy change, and even then the implications of the change might extend to other groups. As a result—and this is the authors' third observation—it is mainly coalitions that organize to change or defend the status quo. As they put it, “‘lone ranger’ lobbying is far from the norm” (p. 22). Finally, after interviewing hundreds of lobbyists and government officials, they find that issue attention is at a premium in Washington DC. There are so many potential issues that the public agenda can encompass only a small fraction at any given time. Thus, a major lobbying challenge is simply getting others to care about your issue.
Separate chapters describe the effects of partisanship and elections, the forces that shape interest group arguments, the various tactics that advocates employ, and the ways in which participants try to frame the issues on which they are working. Each of these chapters contains keen insights. For example, the authors observe that bipartisanship is more difficult to sustain as an issue receives greater attention, suggesting that hopes of visible bipartisan lawmaking are largely misplaced.
Within the set of broad observations are two findings that are sure to raise the eyebrows of readers. First, as hinted at previously, the authors argue that resources are not decisive factors in determining policy change. Rather, they postulate something like an efficient market hypothesis: “Whatever biases are inherent in the system of interest-group mobilization … these biases are already there, reflected in the status quo” (p. 240). Thus, any changes in existing policy would be equally as likely to reflect a challenge to the status quo as it would the wealthy and powerful shoring up their positions.
The second counterintuitive finding is that policy change tends to be nonincremental. Here, the evidence suggests that a punctuated equilibrium or friction model better describes the pace and extent of policy change (p. 34). Because of the status quo bias of existing institutions and interest group coalitions, efforts at policy change typically fail even when there is a compelling reason to make a marginal policy adjustment. In fact, it is only when conditions change appreciably that enough momentum can be generated to push through such adjustments. Given the discordance between old policies and new demands at that point, when these opportunities arise the solutions are far from incremental.
What is striking about these findings is not that they are necessarily groundbreaking—after all, we have long known about the difficulty in establishing an empirical connection between money and policy outcomes, and the punctuated equilibrium model of policy change is nearly two decades old. Rather, what stands out is the absence of engagement with the fairly extensive literature on policymaking and policy change produced by scholars of American political development, despite the fact that they are asking nearly identical questions. Valuable theoretical and empirical work on policy change has appeared in recent years from Paul Pierson, Kathleen Thelen, Jacob Hacker, and others, in many cases reaching strikingly different conclusions than what is found in this work. For example, Hacker's (2004) idea of “policy drift” would intersect in interesting ways with both of the findings discussed here.
Moreover, Baumgartner and his colleagues seem surprised by the centrality of government actors in lobbying coalitions, noting that they constitute 40% of the advocates in their study. While this may be a departure from the “two lobbyists and a legislator” (p. 304) framework of many interest group scholars, the entrepreneurial government official is pretty much a stock character in the research of historical institutionalists. It would be incredibly fruitful for these two subfields to engage each other more rigorously.
In sum, Lobbying and Policy Change engages broad themes that are central to the research of interest group scholars, but also to a much larger universe of academics and practitioners. The principal question strikes at the heart of normative concerns about our democracy. If the final analysis concludes that interest group influence is less capable of changing policy than we fear, it is no more comforting that a major reason for this is the status quo bias of existing institutional configurations and interest group mobilization. Still, this is the most important book on lobbying and interest group influence in at least a generation and will be foundational for many interest group scholars to come.
