Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Is It What They Say, or Who Says It? An Experimental Study of Lobbying Influence and Agenda Setting in Congress

立法者的认知倾向如何影响他们听取哪些组织的意见，以及他们接受或拒绝哪些论点？对国会中利益集团影响力的普遍描述是，富有的游说者向当权者施压，要求他们为他们所代表的群体提供特殊利益，如税收优惠、利润丰厚的政府合同或同情的监管政策。然而，许多政治实践者和社会科学家早就承认，利益集团是政治制度的重要组成部分，因为它们向立法者提供有关政策建议、选民偏好和政治后果的宝贵信息。本研究采用社会认知的决策方法，了解立法者对利益集团联盟的印象如何影响他们对其提供的信息的评价和解释。当从游说者那里获得与政策相关的信息时，立法者被假设为对利益集团和政策的现有态度所激励，这意味着对集团利益和集团信息的评估会影响游说者的影响力。当游说者试图影响那些对政策领域相对不了解的国会议员时，立法者往往会依赖于一个。集团的利益。启发式，提示他们所提倡的问题是否重要。相反，当游说者以相关专家为目标时，立法者将倾向于审查和解释所提出的论点。该学生将招募国会工作人员参与一项实验研究，在受控条件下模拟游说和议程设置。通过在实验环境中系统地操纵游说信息的内容和来源，学生将能够假设地测试立法者如何。对群体的认知。利益会影响他们对政策论点的判断，反之亦然。更广泛的影响：对利益代表的规范理论的启示是，政策制定者不仅仅是被动的游说对象，他们冷静地考虑所有公共政策建议的利弊，而是选择性地关注参与者，他们的看法偏向于某些利益而不是其他利益。因此，这项研究将增进我们对传统上代表性不足的群体在政策过程中得到认真关注的程度的理解。

How do legislators' cognitive predispositions affect which organizations they listen to and which arguments they accept or reject? The popular portrayal of interest group influence in Congress is that well-heeled lobbyists pressure those in power to provide the groups they represent with special benefits such as tax concessions, lucrative government contracts, or sympathetic regulatory policies. Yet, many political practitioners and social scientists alike have long acknowledged that interest groups are an important part of the political system because they provide valuable information about policy proposals, constituent preferences, and political consequences to legislators. This study adopts the social cognition approach to decision making to learn how legislators' impressions about interest group coalitions affect how they evaluate and interpret information supplied by them. When receiving policy-relevant information from lobbyists, lawmakers are hypothesized to be motivated by existing attitudes towards interest groups and towards policies, meaning that evaluations of both the group's interests and the group's message affect how influential lobbyists may be. When lobbyists attempt to influence members of Congress who are relatively uninformed about a policy area, legislators will tend to rely on a .group interests. heuristic that cues them into whether or not the issue being advocated is important. On the contrary, when lobbyists target relative experts, legislators will be inclined to scrutinize and interpret the arguments being made. The student will recruit congressional staff to participate in an experimental study that simulates lobbying and agenda-setting under controlled conditions. By systematically manipulating the content and source of the lobby messages in an experimental setting, the student will be able to hypothetically test how legislators. perceptions of groups. interest bias their judgments about policy arguments, and vice versa. Broader Impacts: The implications for normative theories of interest representation are that policymakers are not merely passive lobbying targets who dispassionately deliberate over the pros and cons of all public policy proposals, but are rather selectively attentive participants whose perceptions are biased in favor of some interests over that of others. This study will therefore improve our understanding of the degree to which traditionally underrepresented groups are given serious attention in the policy process.