Party Competition, Party Polarization, and the Changing Demand for Lobbying in the American States

• Published date: 01 March 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14547678
• Date: 01 March 2015
• Author: Virginia Gray,Boris Shor,John Cluverius,David Lowery,Jeffrey J. Harden
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2015, Vol. 43(2) 175 –204

© The Author(s) 2014

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X14547678

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Article

Party Competition,

Party Polarization, and

the Changing Demand

for Lobbying in the

American States

Virginia Gray1, John Cluverius1,

Jeffrey J. Harden2, Boris Shor3, and David Lowery4

Abstract

Interest system density influences internal dynamics within interest

organizations, how they lobby, and policy conditions. But how do political

conditions influence interest system density? How does politics create

demand for interest representation? We examine these questions by

assessing how legislative party competition and ideological distance between

parties in state legislatures affect the number of lobby groups. After

stating our theoretical expectations, we examine 1997 and 2007 data on

legislative competition and party polarization to assess their influence on

system density. We find mixed results: Whereas politics slightly influenced

the structuring of nonprofit interest communities, they seem to have not

affected the structuring of for-profit interest communities or interest

communities as a whole.

Keywords

interest organizations, interest system density, population ecology,

polarization, state legislatures

1University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

2University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

3Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

4The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, US

Corresponding Author:

John Cluverius, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

CB #3265, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

Email: cluverius@unc.edu

547678APRXXX10.1177/1532673X14547678American Politics ResearchGray et al.

research-article2014

176 American Politics Research 43(2)

The study of communities of organized interests has developed very rapidly

over the last decade and a half.1 We now know that populations matter a

great deal. They matter most immediately in terms of defining the severity

of the collective action problems organizations face (Lowery & Gray, 1995).

Interest system density influences their mortality risks (Nownes & Lipinski,

2005), the kinds and number of issues on which they lobby (Lowery, 2007;

Lowery, Gray, Kirkland, & Harden, 2012), and how they do so (Bosso,

2005; Lowery et al., 2009). Perhaps of greatest interest, we now know that

the diversity of interest systems is a complex result of variations in the den-

sity functions of different subsets or guilds of interest organizations rather

than a simple product of wealth as power, and that for-profit and nonprofit

interest communities are not necessarily motivated by the same factors

(Lowery, Gray, & Fellowes, 2005). At the end of the influence production

process, we know that the density and diversity of interest communities can

sometimes, but not always, influence the shape of public policy (Gray,

Lowery, & Benz, 2013).

In short, we know that interest system density influences internal dynam-

ics within interest organizations, how they lobby, and policy conditions.

But how do political conditions influence interest system density? How do

these conditions create a demand for interest representation? A few others

have studied versions of this question. Boehmke (2005), for example, asked

how the ability of citizens and organized interest groups to circumvent the

legislative process through use of the initiative alters traditional state and

interest group politics. His answer was that initiative states have almost

30% more interest groups and more than 40% more citizen groups, making

them more representative of the public than states without the initiative

(Boehmke, 2005). We examine these larger questions by assessing how

ideological distance between the two major parties in U.S. state legislatures

influences how many organized interests register to lobby those legisla-

tures. We address a question that a student asked one of us at the end of a

course: “[i]f party polarization is increasing, is there still room left for

interest groups to be influential?” After laying out our theoretical expecta-

tions about these relationships, we examine 1997 and 2007 data on party

polarization as well as legislative party competition to assess their influ-

ence on the density of state interest systems. We find indications that both

measures of the character of politics within the states matter slightly in

structuring interest nonprofit interest communities, but not for-profit inter-

est communities. This raises concerns about the changing nature of orga-

nized economic interests compared with noneconomic interests, where

several anomalous patterns have been observed.