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ECPR

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"Lobbying and Policy Change" 20 years later

Interest Groups
Public Policy
Agenda-Setting
Lobbying
Policy Change
Madeline Pfaff
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Frank Baumgartner
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jeffrey Berry
Tufts University
Marie Hojnacki
Pennsylvania State University
David Kimball
University of Missouri–St. Louis
Beth Leech
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Madeline Pfaff
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Abstract

The book "Lobbying and Policy Change" by Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David Kimball, and Beth Leech broke new ground in the interest group subfield by studying 98 randomly selected lobbying issues and studying those issues over a four-year period. As the largest study of its kind and the only one to make use of randomly selected issues, it was well placed to come to conclusions about the nature of money and political resources for interest groups in Washington, DC. The book somewhat surprisingly concluded that in most cases, the interest groups with the most money were not the groups most likely to win, in large part because the "sides" of the issues were usually heterogenous, with both well-resourced and poorly resourced groups represented on each point of view. Now, 20 years after data collection for this project was completed, we look back at our 98 issues to see what has changed. Are the winners still the winners? Have business groups gained an advantage over citizen groups? Do our findings still hold?