Interest Groups

This study asks whether legislators change their votes when informed about an interest group’s size, economic importance and sectoral reach. Using a combination of a field experiment that randomized messages from a pro‑reform business organization, a survey experiment with lobbyists, and in‑depth interviews with senior political actors, the article tests whether informational cues about group characteristics increase legislators’ support. The contribution is a mixed‑methods, realistic test of cue‑based informational lobbying in a Brazilian setting, triangulating experimental and qualitative evidence without overclaiming generalizability.

This study asks whether offering compensation to concentrated opponents can increase public support for politically difficult reforms. The authors present arguments for and against “buyouts” and then test public attitudes using survey experiments about three reform cases: phasing out coal energy, simplifying tax filing, and granting amnesty to dictators. They report that buyouts can attract majority support but that approval varies with partisanship and program design: buyouts directed to workers receive higher approval than those for firms. The abstract emphasizes that moral objections — a reluctance to reward actors who obstruct beneficial reforms — and a credibility problem (supporters’ willingness to renege on payments after reform) constrain the democratic viability of buyouts. The authors conclude that buyouts may make stalled reforms politically feasible, but their acceptability depends on careful institutional design and public perceptions.

What explains frequent exchange-rate interventions in East Asia? This study asks whether organized export interests prompt policymakers to devalue currencies and presents evidence from Japan and Korea using news-based measures of exporters’ public pressure. The authors build a proxy for exporter lobbying from daily reports in leading financial newspapers and apply machine-learning scaling to trace how industry demands evolve before interventions. Their contribution is a novel measurement strategy linking publicized industry demands to episodes of currency depreciation.

States have long been treated as “laboratories of democracy,” where learning and competition spread policy innovations. Building on policy feedback scholarship, this article develops a new framework of policy interdependence showing that state policies do more than teach or compete—they reshape interest-group politics across state lines.

Interest groups that represent marginalized populations (women, people of color, Native nations, and the poor) often claim to champion their most vulnerable constituents but regularly neglect those facing intersectional disadvantage.

This study asks whether a change of government altered interest groups’ ability to attain policy preferences in Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), comparing the Conte Draft with the Draghi Plan. Using public statements from 20 main Italian interest groups, the authors present a within-case longitudinal comparison of how groups appraised the NRRP across the two versions.

New research examines how governments can successfully implement climate policies despite pushback from powerful interest groups.

Civil society mobilization and human rights treaty ratifications put pressure on governments. But this can backfire: committed governments may demobilize critics to avoid scrutiny.

Why do political parties pay attention to interest groups? This article examines how German parties respond to lobbying influence versus voter concerns across eleven issue areas and seven elections from 1987-2009.

A new methodology—the bipartite link community model (biLCM)—infers political actors' latent memberships in communities of collective activity that shape observable interactions. Unlike existing approaches, biLCM is designed for two distinct actor sets and captures overlapping and multi-faceted interaction structure.

New scholarship argues for recentering interest groups in American politics research. This paper explores their influence through bureaucratic boards governing public pensions, which have significant financial consequences for states, public workers, and taxpayers.

This study examines how legislative turnover affects the effectiveness of revolving-door lobbyists. Using survey data and statistical analysis from a sample dataset representing interest groups across multiple continents, we find that increases in turnover or assembly size significantly reduce the value these individuals bring to their new roles.

How do some bills advance while others stall? This paper explores how interest groups influence the legislative process through their endorsements in Dear Colleague letters.

New research explores how personal connections to civil society organizations (CSOs) can buffer the negative effects of incarceration on political participation beyond traditional voting. Using data from Chicago, this study reveals a counterintuitive finding: while involuntary criminal justice contact generally reduces all forms of political engagement, prior involvement with CSOs strengthens nonvoting political activities among those who've been incarcerated—even in states that restore the franchise immediately after release. The findings challenge simplistic assumptions about civic disengagement post-incarceration and suggest complex pathways to sustained political influence outside electoral processes.

This article examines why democracies sometimes renege on sovereign debt during crises.

This paper introduces a novel method using campaign finance data to measure political ideology.