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The mobilization of organized interests is affected not only by social and economic 'supply' factors but also by government-related 'demand' factors. The authors assess the impact of government activity on the mobilization of interests by examining how federal policy activity stimulates lobbying activity in the states. Empirically, they do this by introducing the federal hearings data used by Leech et al. into the model of state lobbying registrations used by Gray et al. The authors find that congressional hearings in a particular issue area have significant--albeit complex--effects on the mobilization of state interest organizations in that same area. Keywords: Congress; interest groups; agenda setting; policy diffusion

Using an agenda-setting approach, we show the interaction between the growth of groups and the growth of government. A pooled time-series analysis of more than 45,000 lobby registration reports from 1996 to 2000 and measures of government activity from the Policy Agendas Project indicates that groups become active in Washington, D.C., in large part because of pre-existing levels of government activity in the issue-areas that concern them. The growth in the range and number of activities of government has created incentives for organizations of all kinds to mobilize, whether they are supporters or opponents of new government programs. We find that levels of government attention in an issue-area explain the level of interest-group lobbying more consistently than does government spending or the number of business firms in that area. We conclude with a discussion of the need for theories of group mobilization to include attention to the demand-creating actions of government itself.

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 Schattschneider's 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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Which European universities and research centres are most prominent in research on European Union (EU) interest groups? What are the theoretical perspectives employed currently in this scholarship? What research designs do scholars employ to study and investigate EU interest groups? And finally, what are the academic works that constitute the core building blocks on which researchers of EU lobbying build their theoretical arguments and empirical research? We answer these questions by analysing an original, built-for-purpose dataset providing information on the theoretical approaches, research designs and bibliographic references employed in 196 academic articles published on the topic of EU lobbying and interest groups in 22 European and American journals of political science and public policy. The dataset also contains information about authors' academic affiliation and Ph.D.-awarding institutions. We combine two approaches employed in the literature on systematic analyses of a discipline: the research synthesis and meta-analysis approach, and the bibliometric approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science , Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech characterized a series of problems in the interest group research published between 1950 and 1995. In this article, we assess whether recent research has become more theoretically coherent, more attentive to context, and broader in both scope and topical focus, all of which are crucial to advancing the systematic study of interest groups and their policy-making activities. Overall, we observe more large-scale and longitudinal studies between 1996 and 2011 than Baumgartner & Leech observed between 1950 and 1995. This newer literature also is much more likely to focus on key issues for students of politics, and to give attention to the context in which organizations operate to affect public policy. However, we see minimal evidence that scholars addressing similar questions within the subfield are operating from one or a few shared theoretical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors show that the number of lobbyists active in a given issue area is driven not only by social mobilizations and economic trends but also by government activity. The effect of government spending is smaller than that of congressional interest as reflected in the number of hearings. Much lobbying is in response to regulations, not budgets. The authors augment their analysis by considering indicators of presidential activities. In areas where the president is traditionally active, presidential activity is shown to divert lobbying away from Congress, reducing overall lobbying levels. The authors find strong support for the congressional demand model of lobbying. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Policy decisions are greatly affected by the way issues are understood collectively by policy-makers and the public. Naturally, advocates attempt to affect these dynamics by drawing attention to one dimension or another. Lobbyists outside government, such as political leaders and civil servants within governing institutions, try to spin or frame the issues on which they work. Research on framing is difficult, however, because of a methodological complication: no individual actor single-handedly determines how issues are defined collectively. The collective dynamics of agenda-setting and framing are subject to strong competitive forces, maintaining a stable equilibrium at most times, but also to threshold effects that can occasionally lead to rapid shifts in issue definitions. Research strategies used to study one face of framing (at the individual level) are ill suited to study the second face of framing (aggregate shifts in collective issue definitions). We discuss the two faces of framing as they relate to recent literature on policy-making in the European Union and we suggest some avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the ambiguities in the theory of counteractive lobbying stating that these anomalies were caused from the use of cross-sectional variance models. Basic questions need to be solved; Previous work conducted by Truman 1951, Dahl 1961; Problems with modelling and measurement; Examples of different models being used; Simultaneous counteractive behavior; How to avoid contradictions in interest group studies.