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Giving a Little to Get a Little: A Bargaining Model of Interest Group Coalition Formation
Unformatted Document Text:  4 in work on public interest lobbies by McFarland (1984; 1993), Rothenberg (1992), and Berry (1999) who paint pictures of groups deliberately choosing to challenge the dominance of trade associations and economic interests that an older generation of political scientists argued held the policymaking process in thrall (e.g., McConnell 1966; Lowi 1969). That a highly competitive environment now exists is exemplified in recent work by Heinz et al. (1993) and Nownes (2001). Even if the group density on most issues is relatively low, as Baumgartner and Leech (2001) show, the fact that nearly all issues in their data set show at least two groups being active implies that on most issues there is indeed some competition. Coalition building is one consequence of this competitive environment because what they are fundamentally about is political elites with differing preferences on issues finding ways to resolve these differences to support common positions. Coalition research, therefore, is one scholarly benefit of thinking about interest group competition, though not the only one. Austen- Smith and Wright (1992; 1994), for example, model a process of simultaneous counteractive lobbying based in the literature on lobbyist access to legislators that nonetheless takes competition as its driving assumption. Group formation and maintenance too may be partially driven by competition as the emergence of the public interest lobbies demonstrates (see Berry 1999). Taken together this suggests that there is something to be gained in the study of interest group politics generally by modeling how and why lobbyists compete and what the consequences of this competition might be. In this paper I attempt to lay out a descriptive version of a model of interest group competition that focuses on position taking by lobbyists on issues and use it to predict coalition formation. I then present an empirical test of this model with data on interest group coalitions drawn from interviews with Washington, D.C. lobbyists on six different issues.

Authors: Holyoke, Thomas.
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in work on public interest lobbies by McFarland (1984; 1993), Rothenberg (1992), and Berry
(1999) who paint pictures of groups deliberately choosing to challenge the dominance of trade
associations and economic interests that an older generation of political scientists argued held the
policymaking process in thrall (e.g., McConnell 1966; Lowi 1969). That a highly competitive
environment now exists is exemplified in recent work by Heinz et al. (1993) and Nownes (2001).
Even if the group density on most issues is relatively low, as Baumgartner and Leech (2001)
show, the fact that nearly all issues in their data set show at least two groups being active implies
that on most issues there is indeed some competition.
Coalition building is one consequence of this competitive environment because what they
are fundamentally about is political elites with differing preferences on issues finding ways to
resolve these differences to support common positions. Coalition research, therefore, is one
scholarly benefit of thinking about interest group competition, though not the only one. Austen-
Smith and Wright (1992; 1994), for example, model a process of simultaneous counteractive
lobbying based in the literature on lobbyist access to legislators that nonetheless takes
competition as its driving assumption. Group formation and maintenance too may be partially
driven by competition as the emergence of the public interest lobbies demonstrates (see Berry
1999). Taken together this suggests that there is something to be gained in the study of interest
group politics generally by modeling how and why lobbyists compete and what the
consequences of this competition might be. In this paper I attempt to lay out a descriptive
version of a model of interest group competition that focuses on position taking by lobbyists on
issues and use it to predict coalition formation. I then present an empirical test of this model
with data on interest group coalitions drawn from interviews with Washington, D.C. lobbyists on
six different issues.


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