Testing the Effects of Professional Grassroots Lobbying Campaigns on Civic and Political Engagement

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SES-0851153Edward T. WalkerUniversity of VermontThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(Public Law 111-5).How has the civic and political participation of American citizens been changed by the growth of paid efforts to lobby the public? No study to date has examined systematically how professional lobbying of the public is changing participation. This project will help to overcome this limitation by studying the activities of Professional Grassroots Lobbying Firms (PGLFs), which are organizations that, for a fee, use communications technologies to subsidize public participation on issues of interest to businesses, trade associations, interest groups, political parties, and government agencies. These organizations help to lower the perceived costs of participation by, for example, providing targeted activists with a ready-made message that could be easily sent to one?s local, state, and/or federal-level representatives. Through a systematic survey of N=233 PGLFs (each asked about ten recent campaigns over eight years, allowing for analyses of 2,330 firm-campaigns), follow-up interviews, and analyses that tie the survey results to state-level civic and political data, the intellectual merit of the proposed study is to greatly expand our understanding of the effects of paid, professional mobilization of the public. The study asks three major research questions: (1) Do the campaigns of PGLFs exacerbate participatory inequalities by subsidizing the participation of those that are already overrepresented in the political system? (2) Do these campaigns further political polarization and reduce citizens? social capital? (3) How effective are these campaigns in shaping public participation and, ultimately, legislative decision-making? There are three broader impacts of the study. First, this research will help to bring rigorous social scientific data to bear on the theory that public life is becoming increasingly privatized. Second, it will analyze the unique survey responses from sampled PGLFs, in conjunction with external data sources, using innovative panel models. Finally, the results of the research will hold great potential for informing policy through understanding how professional mobilization either augments or mitigates participatory inequalities as well as the political power of the firms? institutional clients.