1. Group Strategies for Influence
Charlie Carlee University of Georgia April 25, 2019

2. Objectives By the end of this meeting, participants should be able to:
Describe strategies interest groups use to try to influence policy.

3. Determining Group Power
Can be difficult to measure the effect of lobbying
Many factors might influence a legislator’s vote
Interest groups tend to lobby those who favor their cause already
Pluralism in American politics
Interests of the wealthy are overrepresented
It is difficult to know whether or not groups influence the decisions of policy makers. The legislator who is lobbied by a group might have voted for the legislation anyway due to personal beliefs, constituents’ opinions, party leaders’ pressure, pressure from other legislators, etc.
Political Scientist Robert Dahl (and others after) concluded that American government was pluralist. This means that no one group dominates decision making. Instead, within different policy areas certain groups were influential. While this may be true, other scholars suggest that even though there are many groups representing diverse interests there is an underlying bias in favor of the interests of the wealthy.
For discussion: Ask the class to think back to the demographics of members of Congress and also the demographics of who tends to vote (both groups are wealthier, more educated, and older than the average American). If the same is true for interest groups, who represents and speaks for the poor, uneducated, and young?
The West Wing episodes “The Crackpots and These Women” and “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” do a nice job illustrating group pluralism in American politics. Each of the staffers meets for the day with groups that often do not get heard from.

4. Access to Members of Congress
Legislators tend to grant more access to two types of groups
Groups that represent constituents
Groups that contribute to their campaigns
Contribution records:
Electoral connection
A future slide covers campaign finance in more detail, but point out to the class the role elections play in policy making and also the lobbying of interest groups.
If a group can claim it represents the member’s constituents (or at least shares the opinions of the legislator’s constituents) and if the group directly helps get the member elected by giving money to the campaign, the legislator is much more likely to listen.

5. Inside and Outside Tactics
Inside tactics
Working directly with government officials
e.g., lobbying legislators, lawsuitss
Outside tactics
Seeking to influence officials indirectly
e.g., working in elections or mobilizing supporters
Sample awareness campaigns:
Interest groups can also use the courts to promote an agenda.
Groups can advocate for or against the confirmation of judicial nominees (refer back to the reaction of interest groups after Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court).
Groups can also file amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs in Supreme Court cases. These briefs allow groups that are not a party to a case to provide the Court with information that can aid its decision making.

6. Campaign Financing
Interest groups give billions of dollars per year to federal candidates
Helps get the group access and attention in the future
Activity: Direct students to From here ask them to use the “Influence and Lobbying” tab at the top of the screen to research where interest groups tend to give their money. This can be an in-class exercise if individual computers are allowed. Otherwise, the instructor can walk the class through a few examples and ask them each to investigate a group before the next class and come prepared to talk about what they discovered.

7. Organized Forms of Public Pressure
Interest groups and social movements are organized clumps of public opinion
Potential for bias, may be unrepresentative of all opinion
Many people and issues are not represented by any group
Even though interest groups and social movements represent the public in biased, unrepresentative ways, they help form the public opinion landscape. Therefore, they are deeply consequential to the policy-making process.

8. Assignments
Due tonight at 11:59pm: Chapter 10 Critical Thinking Exercise on TopHat
For Friday: Read Bullock & Gaddie, Chap. 12
For Tuesday: Read Maltese, Pika & Shively, Chapter 9

9. Additional Material

10. In Comparison: Interest Groups
U.S. has more active and numerous interest groups than other democracies
More points of access & pluralism
Parliamentary democracies have few points of access
Laws in other countries restrict kinds of lobbying
Corporatist style of interest representation
The United States likely has so many groups due to the many points of access in the government. Groups can appeal to the bureaucracy, the White House (maybe even the president), the party leadership in Congress, members of key committees in Congress, or the courts.
The governing cabinet in many parliamentary democracies controls the flow of legislation (committees have little power).
Many countries have a corporatist style of interest representation. In this system, the government grants recognition to a particular group to represent a set of people in society, and then the government grants access to that group alone.
Pluralism in the U.S. allows any group to form and press its cause on government officials.