Marie Hojnacki

Organized Interests and the Decision of Whom to Lobby in Congress

In a departure from previous research, we focus on the dyadic relationship between lobbyists and committee members in the House of Representatives in order to test hypotheses about what factors shape the decisions of individual groups to lobby individual committee members. Our primary assumption is that organized interests seek to expand their supportive coalitions and affect the content and fate of bills referred to committees. In order to accomplish these goals, they give highest priority to lobbying their legislative allies in committee; allies may lobby other members of Congress on a groups behalf and shape legislation to conform with a groups preferences. But organizations with access to a strong resource base can move beyond their allies and work directly to expand support among undecided committee members and legislative opponents. Our empirical analysis provides evidence to support our expectations.

The Lobbying Activities of Organized Interests in Federal Judicial Nominations

Techniques of modern lobbying provide organized interests a variety of tactical options. How does the mix of tactics employed by groups vary across different lobbying campaigns? When, and why, will groups use some tactics and not others? Prior research points to organizational structure and resources, features of the issue, and institutional forces as crucial determinants of lobbying. We analyze patterns of advocacy using data from a survey of interest groups about their activities on 15 federal nominations for judicial and related offices considered by the U.S. Senate from 1984 through 1991. We find that the overall amount of advocacy varies across nominations according to the importance of the office, as do the types of organizations involved-but lobbying tactics do not. We also find that organizational resources have some effects on the use of some tactics, but overall these effects are quite limited. Organizations of all types engage in multiple, often disparate, tactics. The absence of strong organizational constraints helps to account for the regularities we observe across lobbying campaigns.

Whose Deaths Matter? Mortality, Advocacy, and Attention to Disease in the Mass Media

Diseases capture public attention in varied ways and to varying degrees. In this essay, we use a unique data set that we have collected about print and broadcast media attention to seven diseases across nineteen years in order to address two questions. First, how (if at all) is mortality related to attention? Second, how (if at all) is advocacy, in the form of organized interest group activity, related to media attention? Our analysis of the cross-disease and cross-temporal variation in media attention suggests that who suffers from a disease as well as how many suffer are critical factors in explaining why some diseases get more attention than others. In particular, our data reveal that both the print and the broadcast media tend to be much less attentive to diseases that disproportionately burden blacks relative to whites. We also find a positive link between the size of organizational communities that take an interest in disease and media attention, though this finding depends on the characteristics of those communities. Finally, this study also reveals the limitations of relying on single-disease case studies-and particularly HIV/AIDS-to understand how and why disease captures public attention. Many previous inferences about media attention that have been drawn from the case of AIDS are not reflective of the attention allocated to other diseases.

Images of an unbiased interest system

ABSTRACT Since political scientists were introduced to the concept of ‘the scope and bias of the pressure system’ by Schattschneider more than half a century ago, we have grappled with the lack of a standard against which to assess bias. Still, scholars have continued to address Schattschneiders provocative claim. This means that they must have in their minds at least implicit images of the unknown state of an unbiased interest system. We uncover these implicit images in this analysis both for their own intrinsic interest and perhaps as a foundation for more progressive research on biases in interest representation. Ten scholars who have done considerable work on the politics of interest representation were asked to provide a brief description of what he or she would see as an unbiased interest system. After presenting each, we summarize the themes that emerged and discuss possible avenues for empirical research on bias.