What Factors Guide Issue Prioritization among Interest Groups? Preliminary Evidence from the US and Australia.

Interest groups are important intermediaries in western democracies, with the potential to offer political linkage. They can function as filter or barometer of the preferences of particular groups in society, and in that way form a bridge between the concerns of citizens and the agenda of political elites. And while we know an increasing amount about the issue-based activity of groups, we do not as yet know much at all about how they selected these issues to work on, or why they decide not to focus their activities on particular matters.. This raises the question: How do groups prioritize issues? In this paper, we provide a first empirical assessment of this question, relying on a data from surveys of interest groups in the United States and Australia [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]