How the Flattened Costs of Grassroots Lobbying Affect Legislator Responsiveness

• Author: John Cluverius
• Date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916688110
• Published date: 01 June 2017
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912916688110

Political Research Quarterly

2017, Vol. 70(2) 279 –290

© 2017 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912916688110

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Article

Citizens, Groups, and Government in

the Digital Age

On their own and motivated by groups, Americans send

hundreds of thousands of messages to officials across all

levels of government on policy matters (Butler,

Karpowitz, and Pope 2012). In surveys and interviews,

these officials at every level say they want to hear from

constituents about policy issues, but recent changes in

technology (Karpf 2012) have reshaped how constituents

contact legislators and how interest groups wield grass-

roots lobbying1 as a tool to accomplish their goals.

Information is plentiful, it costs less to produce a lot of it

than before, and technology is changing the way that gov-

ernment receives information about what citizens want.

Leading theories of information in legislatures and

explanations of grassroots lobbying rely on the assump-

tion that the costs of producing information signal some-

thing about that information’s value. However, the costs

of producing this information have flattened, meaning

that the costs of producing one hundred e-mail messages

are now about the same as the costs of producing ten

thousand e-mail messages for both interest groups and

constituents. Developments in the tactics of grassroots

lobbying and the dynamics of interest organizations have

flattened the costs of grassroots lobbying for interest

groups and motivated more groups to use the tactic more

often as a means of maintaining the organization.

Excessive use of grassroots lobbying has flooded legisla-

tors’ in-boxes with duplicate messages and form letters so

much that legislators and their staff have had to develop

new ways of processing and interpreting these messages.

Therefore, to explain information processing by institu-

tional actors in the digital age, we need theories that clar-

ify how political actors in institutions respond when

information is still costly, but where these costs do not

signal value.

In this paper, I present an economic theory of politi-

cal information where trust replaces costs. I posit that

political actors treat information like a commodity.

They use heuristics to help determine the value of

information. Previously, legislators were able to use

e-mail volume—the number of e-mails (or other mes-

sages) sent—as a positive signal of the value of the

information. Grassroots lobbying would signal how

688110PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916688110Political Research QuarterlyCluverius

research-article2017

1University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA

Corresponding Author:

John Cluverius, Department of Political Science, University of

Massachusetts Lowell, Dugan Hall Suite 201, 883 Broadway Street,

Lowell, MA 01854, USA.

Email: John_Cluverius@uml.edu

How the Flattened Costs of

Grassroots Lobbying Affect

Legislator Responsiveness

John Cluverius1

Abstract

Leading theories of grassroots lobbying assert that legislators should respond positively to the volume of grassroots

lobbying messages because volume indicates the salience of an issue among constituents. This notion rests on the idea

that the costs of producing a large volume of grassroots lobbying signals the value of the information to legislators.

Advances in technology and strategy, however, have flattened the costs associated with producing such information—

it costs much less to generate one additional e-mail message than before. In this environment, the volume of grassroots

lobbying no longer signals the value of the information it contains. Instead, I believe trust becomes the critical factor in

evaluating grassroots lobbying. I test this theory using a survey of state legislators. I find that lobbying message volume

has no effect on legislator responses to higher salience issues, and a negative effect on lower salience issues.

Keywords

information technology, state politics and policy, legislative studies, media and communications, civil society and

voluntary groups