Collaborative Research on Lobbying

这个合作研究项目涉及数百个采访华盛顿的政策倡导者，以调查团体如何通过他们提供的论点，证据和问题定义来塑造决策过程，以争夺政治影响力。 根据他们参与政府游说的频率，选择了大约100名游说者的初始样本。 这些人都接受了面谈，并被要求描述他们就其团体感兴趣的最新政策事项所做的宣传工作。 然后将对平均每期五名主要决策者进行额外采访。 这些访谈的目的是了解不同联盟在100个问题中的每一个问题上使用的策略和论点。 关于每个问题的其他数据是从二手来源收集的。 由于所选择的一些问题可能很小，公众相对不了解，访谈可能是了解政策制定过程的唯一途径。 样本中的其他问题可能涉及广泛的公众辩论，大规模的媒体关注和丰富的公开信息。 结果将是大约100个精心收集的问题模块，代表了吸引游说者注意的问题样本。 目标是收集尽可能多的信息，关于公共和私人在问题定义，施压，公共关系和科学争论方面的努力，这些都发生在政策辩论的随机样本中。 通过这种方式，该项目与以前的工作不同，因为研究人员避免了只关注PAC的贡献，媒体宣传或任何其他单一的游说策略。 由此产生的数据库不仅为他们的研究提供了动力，而且通过在网络上提供每个案例研究以及一组统计指标的摘要，他们对游说行为的研究产生了更多的兴趣。 这些具有可比性和详细性的案例研究使学者们能够对各种团体游说活动进行自己的比较，希望为进一步的研究提供经验基础。

This collaborative research project involves hundreds of interviews with Washington policy advocates in order to investigate how groups compete for political influence through the arguments, evidence, and issue definitions they offer to shape the policymaking process. An initial sample of approximately 100 lobbyists is selected based on the frequency of their involvement in government lobbying. Each of these individuals is interviewed in-person and asked to describe their advocacy efforts on the most recent policy matter of interest to their groups. Additional interviews with an average of five leading policy makers per issue will then be conducted. The purpose of these interviews is to learn about the strategies and arguments used by the different coalitions on each of the 100 issues. Additional data about each issue is collected from secondary sources. Since some of the issues to be chosen are likely to be small and relatively unknown to the public, interviews may be the only way to learn about the policy development process. Other issues in the sample are likely to involve extensive public debate, large-scale media attention, and a wealth of publicly available information. The result will be approximately 100 carefully collected issue-modules representing a sample of issues attracting the attention of lobbyists. The goal is to collect as much information as possible about the public and private efforts at issue-definition, arm-twisting, public relations, and scientific arguing occurring in a random sample of policy debates. In this way, the project is distinct from prior work in that the investigators have avoided focusing only on PAC contributions, media campaigns, or any other single tactic of lobbying.A team of scholars working with graduate students conducts the multi-year data collection. The resulting databases not only fuel their research but by making each of the case studies as well as a summary set of statistical indicators available over the Web, they generate more interest in the study of lobbying behavior. The comparable and detailed case studies allow scholars to make their own comparisons of various group lobbying activities, hopefully providing the empirical back-bone on which much further research can be based.