Polarization & the Declining Value of Special Interests to Legislating

• In Event: Lawmaking Today

Abstract

What are consequences of interest group partisanship for groups' ability to secure desired bill outcomes? In previous chapters of our book, we've demonstrated that in the era of insecure majorities, many groups--especially those with campaign resources to offer or whose core issues are highly partisan--have broadened their lobbying agendas to signal partisan loyalty. But what do groups lose to get a seat at the party table? Here, we incorporate group partisanship into an informational theory of interest group influence on lawmakers' decisions to attend to, support, and/or oppose a bill. We theorize that “mission creep” in groups’ position-taking patterns leads lawmakers to face uncertainty in distinguishing groups' ``core" positions from ``loyalty-signaling" ones. Our core expectation is that the attributes that give groups and group coalitions influence on the outcomes of specific bills under “normal” conditions will matter less when incentives for partisan signaling are the highest: namely, in the era of insecure majorities, and in issue areas that are more closely aligned with party brands. We test this expectation on our dataset of over 200,000 interest group bill positions on congressional legislation spanning 1974 to 2020, as well as with our original measures of issue partisanship and politicization.

Authors

• Jesse M. Crosson, Purdue University

• Geoffrey M. Lorenz, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

• Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan