Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank R. Baumgartner is Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Conflict and Rhetoric in French Policymaking and coauthor (with Bryan Jones) of Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Beth L. Leech is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Texas A&M.

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BASIC INTERESTS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................................ixPreface.......................................................................................................................xiIntroduction..................................................................................................................xvChapter One. Progress and Confusion...........................................................................................3Chapter Two. Barriers to Accumulation.........................................................................................22Chapter Three. The Rise and Decline of the Group Approach.....................................................................44Chapter Four. Collective Action and the New Literature on Interest Groups.....................................................64Chapter Five. Bias and Diversity in the Interest-Group System.................................................................83Chapter Six. The Dynamics of Bias.............................................................................................100Chapter Seven. Building a Literature on Lobbying, OneCase Study at a Time.....................................................120Chapter Eight. Surveys of Interest-Group Activities...........................................................................147Chapter Nine. Learning from Experience........................................................................................168Appendix. Articles on Interest Groups Published in the American Political Science Review, 1950–1995.....................189References....................................................................................................................197Index.........................................................................................................................217

Chapter One

Scholars working in the area of organized interests in politics have made tremendous strides in the past two generations. Comparing the state of our knowledge in 1998 with that in 1948, for example, makes clear that our collective understanding of the roles of groups in politics has become considerably more complete, sophisticated, and accurate. We know more about the nature of political mobilization, about the political activities of organized interests, and about the contours of the group system, to mention a few areas of advance. Probably the most prominent example of progress is how far we have come in understanding the biases in mobilization that benefit certain types of groups, especially occupational ones, and discourage other types of potential groups from forming. Groups were once thought to spring naturally from society in response to disturbances, with little reference to any factors that might facilitate this process in some segments of society or inhibit it in others. David Truman's 1951 Governmental Process was rightly criticized for paying little attention to these issues, but his work represented the state of the art at the time. Today, two generations later, these issues are well recognized. The biases of mobilization contribute to a bias in the Washington interest-group community that has been amply and repeatedly documented over the past several decades. No understanding of the group system would even be attempted today that did not pay serious attention to these obstacles, but these were glossed over in the most prominent study of the topic in the early postwar period.

In this and other areas, scholars have made substantial progress in elaborating more complete, sophisticated, and nuanced views of the roles of groups in the political system. At the same time, however, serious gaps in our knowledge remain. While dramatic progress has been made in some areas of research on interest groups, other topics have either been ignored or have been the subject of inconclusive studies. We are not the first observers to note this unevenness. In this chapter, in fact, we rely heavily on the works of previous scholars who have reviewed the state of the interest-group literature in order to summarize our collective progress. We first look at areas that have proved quite fruitful, then turn to other areas of the literature that have either been avoided or have been investigated by many scholars while producing few conclusive results. The chapter concludes by drawing the lessons from these patterns of progress and confusion.

THE STATE OF THE LITERATURE

Virtually all those who have attempted to summarize the state of the literature in interest-group studies have noted certain areas where an accumulation of studies has led to real and important progress. A few of the most prominent areas of advance have included studies of the biases of mobilization; the collective-action dilemma; the occupational basis of most interest groups; the choice of direct and indirect lobbying tactics; the importance of long-term lobbying relations; the roles of groups in promoting new understandings of issues over the long run; the links between new social movements and the interest-group system; the effects of contextual factors such as laws, government subsidies, institutions, and patrons of group activities on group mobilization; and the roles of groups in elections, campaign finance, and the courts. On the other hand, most reviewers have paid closer attention to a series of problems. Published reviews have noted a long series of difficulties ranging from the choice of research topics to the theories and methods used to investigate them. In this section, we review the range of conclusions that other scholars have drawn in their efforts to state just what we do and do not know about the nature, activities, and effects of interest groups in American politics (for recent reviews, see Greenstone 1975; Salisbury 1975; Garson 1978; Knoke 1986; Schlozman and Tierney 1986; Walker 1991; Cigler 1991; Petracca 1992b; Heinz et al. 1993; Crotty, Schwartz, and Green 1994; Smith 1995; Baumgartner and Leech 1996a; Berry 1997).

In his review of the distribution of scholarly resources in political science in the early 1980s, Douglas Arnold singled out interest-group studies by noting: "Interest groups also seem to have attracted relatively little scholarly attention given their presumed importance. Here, surprisingly, the field is theory rich and data poor...." In spite of a wealth of available theories, he continues, "there are relatively few empirical studies of how various groups operate politically" (Arnold 1982, 97). Arnold attributes some of these problems to the difficulties and expense of data collection: Whereas scholars in some areas can rely on the secondary analysis of large-scale data sets collected by others, interest-group studies require expensive, difficult, and time-consuming field work or original data collection (101). In the years since Arnold wrote, a vast outpouring of scholarly energy has transformed the field. Hundreds of studies have collected data on interest groups and their lobbying activities. The 1980s saw both a resurgence of large-scale surveys of interest-group behavior (see Schlozman and Tierney 1986; Knoke 1990a; Walker 1991; Heinz et al. 1993; Gray and Lowery 1996) and a...