Presidential Mobilization of Organized Interests

• In Event: Presidents and the Public

Abstract

Presidents rely heavily on the personnel and resources of the White House and broader executive branch to pursue their goals, but they also often rely on actors outside their formal supervision to contribute to their efforts. While previous work has investigated how presidents leverage other political elites and institutions, such as members of Congress and parties, to advance their agendas, few have considered how presidents enlist organized interests in service of their aims. Though they lack formal political power, organized interests wield considerable institutional resources that presidents can harness to subsidize their electoral, policymaking, and legacy-building work, and to help them bolster their supportive coalitions in other institutional venues. In this paper, I explore how presidents use engagement with organized interests to mobilize them to support their initiatives and the effectiveness of interests' subsequent advocacy activities. Using survey experiments fielded with both elite (federal lobbyists) and mass public respondents, I find suggestive evidence that interests are more willing to exert effort on presidents' behalf when the White House engages with them in the policy formulation process and that interests' public statements in support of presidential initiatives increase public support for those initiatives. These findings emphasize that the mobilization of organized interests is an underappreciated source of presidential power.

Author

• David Ryan Miller, University of California, Riverside