Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Lobbying Strategies of American Interest Groups

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9631232 Baumgartner Interest groups have long been seen as important actors in the policymaking process and yet scholars remain deeply divided about the means by which interest group influence is achieved. Prior studies have disagreed about whether interest groups act as pressure groups or service bureaus, and about the reasons why one group plies the issue networks of Washington while another turns to the grass roots beyond the beltway. Methodological difficulties have prevented past studies from testing theories of how different political circumstances affect the lobbying tactics groups choose, and have created conundrums such as why mass media tactics are used equally by insider and outsider groups. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project resolves the methodological problems of past research by linking data on many groups to data about specific issues. The project, involving a mail survey of 2,500 interest groups and corporations and in-depth phone interviews with a subsample of 200 survey respondents, is methodologically innovative in that questions about tactic choice will be linked to specific issues selected by the respondents themselves. Tactic use is linked to particular sets of political circumstances, making it possible to test a context-sensitive theory of strategic choice of lobbying tactics. ***