Looking for Influence in All the Wrong Places: How Studying Subnational Policy Can Revive Research on Interest Groups

Abstract

The American politics literature on representation focuses on voters and elected officials, but a growing group of political scientists is arguing that more should be done to study interest groups. Yet there already is a large literature on interest groups-and it has struggled to show evidence of interest group influence. I argue here that the interest group literature's nearexclusive focus on the federal government has hindered its progress: basic questions have gone unasked, important interest groups have gone underappreciated, and the amount of influence has been underestimated. By studying U.S. subnational policymaking, scholars would discover different constellations of interest groups, and they would find that the variation in subnational governments allows for empirical designs that are better able to detect interest group influence when it exists. The payoffs of a subnational focus would be substantial-both for our understanding of interest groups and for the study of political representation.

Financial Solidarity: The Future of Unions in the post-JanusEra

“…Outside of a rich literature on lobbying and campaign contributions, little is known about how interest groups achieve influence in the United States (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Lowery 2013; Lowery and Gray 2004). Anzia (2018) argues that this is because scholars usually study interest groups at the federal level (e.g., Baumgartner et al 2009). She calls for scholars to pay greater attention to subnational levels in order to better understand interest group behavior and influence; because subnational governments address fewer policy areas and there are fewer interest groups, groups can have a larger impact than they would federally.…”

“…This study has relevance beyond labor unions because it speaks to the broader role and importance of organized groups in the American political system. In recent years, a number of scholars have called for interest groups to return to the center of political analysis, noting that the role of organized interests is central to understanding political battles and policy outcomes (Anzia 2018; DiSalvo 2018; Hacker and Pierson 2014; Moe 2015). Federated interest groups, in particular, are an important part of the interest group universe.…”

Politics, Markets, and Pandemics: Public Education’s Response to COVID-19

“…First, nearly all of America's public schools are governed by lay citizens (essentially volunteers) who run for office in low-stakes nonpartisan elections. Second, because these elections are often oddly timed and low-turnout affairs, boards are more insulated from national partisan coattails and are instead dominated by local interests (Anzia 2013(Anzia , 2019. 2 We thus add to the emerging literature on the increasing spread of partisan politicization into American life by examining whether the factors that scholars have traditionally used to explain local school politics-namely market forces and local vested interests-have been…”

Public Policy and Participation in Political Interest Groups: An Analysis of Minimum Wages, Labor Unions, and Effective Advocacy

“…Our analysis incorporates data on macroeconomic covariates that may be relevant as control variables. As in our past work (Clemens and Strain 2018a, 2018b, 2019, we proxy for variations in housing markets using a statewide median house price index from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). We proxy for aggregate economic performance using data on state income per capita from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).…”