Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Efforts to understand the mobilization of organized interests have turned away from focusing on their internal traits to assessing the environmental forces that influence the supply of lobbying organizations and the demand for their services. Unfortunately, empirical analysis has provided far more support for the supply hypothesis than for expectations about the role of policy energy or demand. This has largely been a function of the lack of appropriate measures at either the state or federal level and/or potential problems of research design. We address these problems by testing the energy-stability-area model of interest system density using a new measure of policy energy or demand in cross-state, cross–interest guild, and pooled specifications. We find strong support for the hypothesis that the demand for lobbying—as measured by the size of legislative agendas of concern to different types of organized interests—has a profound effect on the size of lobbying communities.