Legislature Size and Interest Mobilization: The Effects of Institutional Change

• Author: James M. Strickland
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211063214
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(4) 511–524

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211063214

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Legislature Size and Interest Mobilization:

The Effects of Institutional Change

James M. Strickland

1

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Abstract

Little is known about how legislature size affects the political mobilization of societal interests. I propose that legislative

downsizing events increase the cost of campaigns, and thereby spur additional lobbying by organized interests that corral

monetary resources eff‌iciently. I examine how numbers of organizations with registered lobbyists changed in response to

legislative downsizing events in three states. Using synthetic control analyses, I f‌ind that downsizing did not affect organization

totals in Massachusetts or Rhode Island, but that Illinois’Cutback Amendment precipitated a 25-percent increase in organized

interests. Further tests disconf‌irm that monetary-based interests were most likely to mobilize anew after the Amendment ’s

implementation. In general, these mixed f‌indings imply that changes in legislature size alone are insuff‌icient for affecting interest

mobilization but that other kinds of legislative reforms, such as the transition from cumula tive to plurality voting that ac-

companied Illinois’downsizing, may affect mobilization rates.

Keywords

lobbying, legislatures, seats, reform, campaign f‌inance

Introduction

For decades, social scientists have lamented the lack of

economic diversity among organized interest groups in

America. Broadly construed, interest groups are said to

represent the upper class more often than other classes

(Schattschneider, 1960;Schlozman et al., 2012). Indeed,

among groups that lobby, business f‌irms and professional

associationstypically outnumber labor unionsand cause-based

groups. Concurrently, social scientistshave limited knowledge

about the effects of legislative institutions on the political

mobilization and inf‌luence of various organized interests. Such

institutions,however, are the primaryvenues in which interests

lobby to inf‌luence public policy. If legislatures may be re-

formed in ways thatinduce more or less lobbying by organized

interests in general, or sets of interests in particular, then such

reformshave implications for the relative inf‌luencethat various

interests exerciseover policy and, by extension, the alignment

of policy with public opinion.

In recent decades, social scientists have begun to explore

the numbers and kinds of organizations that mobilize polit-

ically or lobby. Lowery and Gray (1995) proposed that, while

numbers of organized interests are the result of group-level

decisions to lobby, the political context in which interests

operate also matters for mobilization. For example, some

political systems are crowded with numerous interest groups

and, as a result, individual groups more often stop lobbying or

dissolve altogether. Gray and Lowery (1996) f‌irst began to

explore interest populations because a previous narrative

(Olson, 1982) linkinggroup-level mobilization with the large-

scale effects of organized interests on policy lacked empirical

support. Throughout a series of subsequent publications, they

and other scholars began to explore the diversity of organized

interests and the implications of such diversity for traditional

accounts of biased mobilization. The present analysis extends

this work by examining how one aspect of political

environments—legislature size—affects the mobilization of

interest groups.

Legislatures vary in membership size across time and

borders in signif‌icant ways. In the United States, colonial as-

semblies typically contained between a dozen and forty

members (Squire, 2012,p.13).Overtime,Americanlegisla-

tures grew in size. Today, Congress contains more than 500

members and the largest state legislature has more than 400

members. Among the 44 state legislatures that existed in 1900,

34 experienced a size change at some point before 2012 (Squire,

2012, p. 267). Assemblies beyond the United States vary even

more widely with some chambers containing multiple thou-

sands of members and others having only several dozen.

1

Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

James M. Strickland, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State

University, P.O. Box 873902, Tempe, AZ 85287-3902, USA.

Email: james.strickland@asu.edu