"Lobbying and Policy Change": 20 Years Later

• In Event: US Interest Group Tactics, Framing, and Influence

Abstract

The book 'Lobbying and Policy Change' by Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David
Kimball, and Beth Leech broke new ground by studying 98 randomly selected lobbying issues and studying those issues over a four-year period. As the largest study of its kind and the only one to make use of randomly selected issues, it was well placed to describe the frequency and nature of policy change, and to come to conclusions about the nature of money and political resources for interest groups in Washington, DC. The book offered evidence of the durability of the status quo and somewhat surprisingly concluded that in most cases, the interest groups with the most money were not the groups most likely to win, in large part because
the 'sides' of the issues were usually heterogenous, with both well-resourced and poorly resourced groups
represented on each point of view. Now, 20 years after data collection for this project was completed, we look back at our 98 issues to see what has changed. Does the status quo remain resilient after two decades? How, if at all, have the issues evolved? Are the winners still the winners? Have business groups gained an advantage over citizen groups? Do our findings still hold?

Authors

• Madeline Pfaff, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Beth L. Leech, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• David C. Kimball, University of Missouri, St. Louis

• Marie Hojnacki, Pennsylvania State University

• Jeffrey M. Berry, Tufts University

• Frank R. Baumgartner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill