Collaborative Research on the Population Ecology of State Interest Communities

国家利益共同体的人口生态学研究既探索了利益共同体为什么是这样的结构，也探索了这种结构如何影响利益组织的政治行为。这项研究梳理了利益集团是如何产生的，它们是如何维持的，以及它们是如何失败的。利用人口生态学框架，其中包括生态位、觅食和进化生存模型，该项目对各州样本中的利益集团进行了为期四年的普查，调查了这些利益集团领导人的子样本，并建立了不同政策领域利益集团的生命表。运用多元统计技术对广泛收集的数据进行分析。这个项目揭示了一些利益集团为什么成功，为什么另一些利益集团失败，提供了一种与政治学学科常见的解释截然不同的解释。

The Population Ecology of State Interest Communities study explores both why interest communities are structured the way they are and how that structure affects the political behavior of interest organizations. The study disentangles how interest groups arise, how they are maintained and how they fail. Using the population ecology framework, which includes models of niches, foraging and evolutionary survival, this project generates a four year census of interest groups in a sample of states, surveys a subsample of those interest group leaders and builds a life table of interest groups in different policy domains. Multivariate statistical techniques are used to analyze the extensive data collection. This project sheds light on why some interest groups succeed and why others fail, offering an explanation very different from that which is common to the political science discipline.