Interest Group Influence in the U. S. Congress

Abstract

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Disease Politics and Medical Research Funding

“…Despite a growing body of research on advocacy's outcomes (Amenta et al 2010;Andrews and Edwards 2004;Baumgartner and Leech 1998;Burstein 1999;Giugni 1999;Smith 1995), only direct benefits have been systematically studied empirically.…”

Environmentalism, democracy, and pollution control

“…VanGrasstek [59] finds an effect of environmental lobby groups' political action during the NAFTA negotiations in the US Senate, Cropper et al [9] finds that intervention by environmental advocacy groups raise the probability that the USEPA cancelled a pesticide registration, and Riddel [54] shows that the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters have been successful in influencing US Senate election outcomes using campaign contributions (via political action committees). Note that Jackson and Kingdon [31] demonstrate that using an index of other roll call votes as a proxy for members' ideology produces inconsistent estimates of the coefficients (see also Smith [55]). …”

"Hearing from all sides" How legislative testimony influences state level policy-makers in the United States

“…Some researchers found testimony from interest groups to be a "scripted show for the committee…" (15), that is often times ignored (16). Yet other literature suggests that testimony can influence and strengthen the language of a policy (16), and may be an important source of credible information for later floor debate (17), even shifting as many as 30-40 votes in the U.S. House of Representatives (18 Qualitative analysis Qualitative responses to the survey questions were analyzed using a general inductive approach in which the authors sought to discover themes in the raw data unencumbered by a predefined structure or theory (12). This approach was particularly appropriate given the lack of existing research on the influence of testimony overall and what elements of testimony are most influential.…”