The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation

One of the central concerns about American policy making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions - legislative, administrative, and legal - is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strategies of groups. In this paper we examine in a formal theoretical model how the opportunity to litigate administrative rulemaking in the courts affects the lobbying strategies of competing interest groups at the rulemaking stage. Using a resource-based view of group activity, we develop a number of important insights about each stage that cannot be observed by examining each one in isolation. We demonstrate that lobbying effort responds to the ideology of the court, and the responsiveness of the court to resources. In particular, (1) as courts become more biased toward the status quo, interest group lobbying investments become smaller, and may be eliminated all together, (2) as interest groups become wealthier, they spend more on lobbying, and (3) as the responsiveness of courts to resources decreases, the effect it has on lobbying investments depends on the underlying ideology of the court

When Do Interest Groups Use Electronic Rulemaking?

This paper analyzes how electronic rulemaking is affecting the propensity of interest groups to file comments and replies at the Federal Communications Commission. The paper shows that exogenous events and a handful of issues drive filing behavior. Implications of the analysis are discussed

Lobbying and Information in Politics

The vast majority of papers written about interest groups ’ political in uence focuses on the role of money in politics. Business and interest groups ’ partici-pation in campaign nance, in the form of hard and soft money, has been the subject of hundreds of theoretical and empirical studies. Moreover, with the recent congressional moves to reform campaign nance laws, campaign nance studies have received a prominent position in public discourse. There are two striking results about this line of academic work. First, political action committees (PACs) gave $245 million to congressional candidates in form of campaign contributions in the 1999–2000 election cycle (about$123 million annually), and corporations, unions, and interest groups gave $153 million in “soft money ” to political parties during the 1997–1998 election cycle (about$76 million annually).1 Yet, Congress controls a $2 trillion budget, nearly 40 percent of which is discretionary spending. This raises a potential puzzle: why do interest groups pay so little ($200 million annually) to try to in uence policy? To answer this question, we turn to a second striking result from the academi

Committee Jurisdiction, Congressional Behavior and Policy Outcomes

The literature on congressional committees has largely overlooked the impact of jurisdictional fights on policy proposals and outcomes. This paper develops a theory of how legislators balance the benefits of expanded committee jurisdiction against preferred policy outcomes. It shows why a) senior members and young members in safe districts are most likely to challenge a committee’s jurisdiction; b) policy proposals may be initiated off the proposer’s ideal point in order to obtain jurisdiction; c) policy outcomes will generally be more moderate with jurisdictional fights than without these turf wars. We empirically investigate these results examining proposed Internet intellectual property protection legislation in the 106th Congress