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The article focuses on a study which examined the impact of advertisements run by 527 organized interests on newspaper coverage. The primary goal of organized interests is to influence politics and policies and this can be accomplished by influencing public officials or public opinion. The study provided evidence for the theory that 527 interest organizations indirectly influence the agenda by airing television advertisements which in turn increase the coverage of their issue in the local news.

This paper examines organized interests? decisions to use in-house or contract lobbyists. Internal factors, such as organization size, lobbying expenditures, distance to the capital, and organization type, and external factors such as the lobbying decisions of similar groups and the stability of salience of the issue, are expected influence this decision. Logit analyses of organized interests? decisions to use in-house lobbyists, contract lobbyists, or both, used data from Baumgartner and Leech?s Lobbying Disclosure Reports and other various sources. The results show that the further an organization is from Washington D.C., the more likely it is to use a contract lobbyist. Also, the more an organization spends on lobbying, the less likely it will be to hire a contract lobbyist. Finally, when choosing between using contract lobbyists only and both contract and in-house lobbyist, group type matters. Compared with other group types, institutions are most likely to use contract lobbying only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines when and how organized interests can affect the campaign agenda. Specifically, it looks at the effect that interest group campaign advertisements had on local news coverage in the 2000 campaign season. When an organized interest airs an ad viewers see that ad and take cues from it, increasing the salience of the issues addressed in the ad. Journalists then respond to this increased salience and run more stories on those issues. Here organized interests are able to buy local news coverage of their issue. I hypothesize that when an interest group, focused on a particular issue, airs an advertisement in a given media market, the number of articles published by newspapers in that media market mentioning that issue will increase. Using data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project and Lexis Nexis newspaper searches, I construct a cross sectional time series, with over 12,000 cases, to analyze this question. Results from a negative binomial regression show that organized interest ads have a small but significant effect on the number of stories on a particular issue in local newspapers. These results show that organized interests are a powerful force in campaigns, beyond their campaign donations, by drawing attention to their issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how organized interests can manipulate candidates' campaign agenda by running issue advertisements. When an independent group poses an issue in the election context, a candidate can either address that issue or ignore it. Even if an ad is ideologically similar to one candidate's position, the message may not correspond with the candidate's campaign strategy. Certain circumstances may affect a candidate's decision to respond, such as their standing in the polls, their partisanship, the salience of the issue to the electorate, and the tone of these advertisements. Using data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project and archives of candidate speeches and press releases, this study will test what affects candidates' decisions to alter their campaign messages in response to interest group issue ads. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how television advertising in campaigns can change or affect the issues candidates talk about. Candidates campaign in an environment where they are not the only ones discussing and propagating political information. Their potential voters are being exposed to issue information from a variety of other sources, opponents, candidates for other offices, parties, and interest groups. While for some the main goal of political advertising may be to sway votes, for others, the main goal is to influence the agenda and bring forth issues that may otherwise be ignored. Candidates often resent this independent group advertising, even when the ad is in their favor, because it may force them to address an issue they would otherwise like to remain silent on. This paper looks at under what circumstances issue advertising affected candidates' agendas in a Congressional race in Ohio in 2000, an area that was bombarded with independent group advertising. Using several different models, it finds that in some cases the tone of an advertisement, the frequency of broadcasts of the ad, and the proximity to the election can affect a candidate's likelihood of responding. It also suggests that issue ownership may play a role in what issues a candidate will respond to. Finally, evidence suggests that candidates are less likely to respond to organized interest advertising than advertising by other actors. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the relationship between campaign advertising and voter turnout, supporting the hypothesis that advertising, in general, has a positive effect on turnout. Using advertising data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project, integrated with turnout data we collected from the nation's top 75 media markets, we also show how campaign tone, advertisement source, and advertisement prevalence can influence macro-level voter turnout in media markets. Extant research is inconclusive about the role of advertising in turnout. Most scholars examine this relationship at either the level of the individual voter or at the state level. This paper contributes to the debate by turning its attention to a rarely used unit of analysis - the designated marketing area (DMA), or media market. A DMA is a compilation of counties which are reached by a television signal. When campaigns or interest groups advertise on television they do it on the DMA level, not at the level of the individual voter or at the state level. Examining data at this level allows us to obtain a more precise estimate of turnout effects since this is the macro context in which voters are exposed to campaign messages. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that 527 issue advertisements played a significant role in the increased negativity in campaign advertisements in the 2004 election campaign and explains the differences among ads run by candidates, parties, and organized interests. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of 527 organized interests' efforts at lobbying the public. It shows how 527 advertisements were able to influence the agenda by increasing local news coverage of their issue. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tests interest group hypotheses on state PACs in the health sector. A unique feature is a dataset connecting individual lobby groups registered in 1998 with individual PACs contributing money in ‘98. We also track nonconnected PACs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]