9
Group Member Preferences as Ideal Position and Constraint
Members are a political organization’s reason for existing and, as Wilson (1973)
articulated, the composition and breadth of a membership largely structures the identity of a
lobbyist in the eyes of lawmakers (though see Heaney 2004), so it is appropriate to begin my
description of the competitive model by exploring how lobbyists respond to this audience. Even
when the incentives used to attract members are more exclusive material benefits rather than
purposive opportunities for political expression (using the classic Clark and Wilson 1961
typology), to a large extent lobbyists are still seen as a walking spokespersons for these
collective desires. And indeed, as Luttbeg and Zeigler (1966) found in their study of the
National Education Association, lobbyists often see themselves as agents faithfully representing
their group member principal. For this reason how group members prefer an issue to be resolved
is the lobbyist’s starting point when initially considering what position to take on an issue and
possibly entering a bargaining process with competing lobbyists. For the CFA lobbyist how his
members want to see an issue such as milk price subsidies resolved becomes his “ideal”
preference. Members who are not satisfied with the performance of the lobbyist will, as
Hirschman (1970) put it, attempt to use “voice” to change the organization from within (pushing
management to fire the lobbyist) or “exit” the group entirely, detracting from its legitimacy and
costing it valuable resources.
Unfortunately, this is not enough to precisely pinpoint the CFA lobbyist’s ideal position
on milk pricing because there is no reason to assume that group members all prefer precisely the
same position on the issue. Rather, what the CFA lobbyist faces is a distribution of member
preferences and variation in how intensely individual members feel about the Federation’s
position. There is, to my knowledge, no systematic empirical research examining the range of
Convention