Action and Reaction in Interest Group Advocacy

This paper presents the first findings from the four-nation “Agendas and Interest Groups” project examining the preferred agendas of interest groups and comparing these to the preferred agendas of citizens and the actual governmental agenda in the US, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. The US data contain interviews with some 70 Washington lobbyists to generate some 408 issues lobbyists are working on or would like to work on (and even some they hope never to have to work on). We show that interest groups overwhelmingly react to, rather than originate, policy issues being addressed by the government. Interest organizations spend most of their time defending the status quo or seeking increased funding for the status quo. In short, the notion that a narrow set of special interest groups are able to set the governmental agenda is not supported in these data.