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Abstract
Competition among organized interests has become a common feature in American
politics, but has not yet become a widely accepted feature in most models of interest group
behavior. In this paper I develop a model of lobbyist decision making and position taking on
issues that is fundamentally rooted in competition with other lobbyists and use it to better
understand coalition formation in interest group politics. By conceiving of lobbyist competition
as a bargaining process, I am able to identify factors helping to facilitate how lobbyists can work
together and what factors will hold them back from forming coalitions with their competitors. I
then test elements of this model with data from interviews with 82 lobbyists on six different
policy issues. The results provide empirical support for the assumptions and key variables of the
model.