The Dynamics of Interest Representation at the U.S. Supreme Court

• Author: Thomas Hansford
• Published date: 01 December 2011
• Date: 01 December 2011
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912910395325

Political Research Quarterly

64(4) 749 –764

© 2011 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912910395325

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How do interests respond to their opponents’ lobbying

activities in a policy venue? Do they seek to directly con-

front and counter the advocacy efforts of the opposition,

or do they allocate their resources to advocacy efforts tar-

geting institutions in which opposing interests are not as

active? Assuming that organized interests exert some

influence over policy outcomes or at least provide rele-

vant information to policy makers, the degree to which

opposing interests compete in a given policy venue or

instead sort themselves into relatively noncompetitive

venues has significant implications for whether policy

outputs will exhibit representational or informational

bias.

Despite the significance of these questions for the

study of American politics, policy making, and represen-

tation, social scientists have not yet fully settled on the

answers. According to the pluralist paradigm, American

politics is fundamentally about the competition between

opposing interests (e.g., Becker 1983; Truman 1951).

This perspective generally suggests that interests will be

responsive to the lobbying activities of their opponents.

This responsiveness could result from either policy-seek-

ing or resource-maximizing behavior. To the extent that

interests pursue influence over policy, they may want to

provide policy makers with information that offsets the

information provided by opponents (Austen-Smith and

Wright 1994). Organizational maintenance concerns may

also cause interest groups to seek out conflictual venues

in which a strong opposition is present, as this may make

it easier to offer purposive incentives to potential

supporters.

Empirical studies of the responsiveness of organized

interests to the lobbying activities of opposing interests

provide mixed results, however. Holyoke (2003) and

Nownes (2000) present survey-based evidence that orga-

nized interests are more likely to lobby policy venues in

which opposing interests are active, while W. L. Hansen

and Mitchell (2000) find that corporate political activity

increases in response to the advocacy efforts of unions.

Austen-Smith and Wright (1994) examine lobbying

activities in the U.S. Senate and also find evidence of

what they call counteractive lobbying (but see

Baumgartner and Leech 1996). In the context of the pol-

icy venue to be examined here, the U.S. Supreme Court,

Solowiej and Collins (2009) demonstrate that the filing of

amicus curiae briefs in support of a litigant corresponds

with the filing of amicus curiae briefs in support of the

opposing litigant. Other studies, however, find little to no

1University of California, Merced, Merced, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Thomas Hansford, University of California, Merced, PO Box 2039,

Merced, CA 95344

Email: thansford@ucmerced.edu

The Dynamics of Interest

Representation at the U.S. Supreme Court

Thomas Hansford1

Abstract

How do organized interests respond to their opponents’ advocacy activities in a policy venue? Utilizing data on amicus

curiae filings at the U.S. Supreme Court, the author estimates vector error correction and vector autoregression

models that allow him test whether interests respond, in a dynamic sense, to the efforts of the “other side.” The

author capitalizes on the temporal sequencing of variation in advocacy activity to gain leverage on the causal connection

between the behaviors of opposing sets of interests and provides a richer portrait of the dynamics of interest

representation in a policy venue. The results reveal that organized interests respond positively to the advocacy

activities of their opponents by exhibiting both short-term counteraction and long-term countermobilization, implying

that over the long run, interest representation at the Court is responsive and perhaps balanced.

Keywords

law, courts, political organizations, parties

750 Political Research Quarterly 64(4)

evidence of organized interests responding to activities of

their opponents (e.g., Ando 2003; Hojnacki and Kimball

1998; Lowery et al. 2005; McKay and Yackee 2007). The

mixed results generated by this literature may be the

result of differing assumptions about the timing of orga-

nized interest responses to their opposition, the static

nature of the analyses, and accompanying difficulties in

identifying causal connections in the data.

In an effort to better understand how organized inter-

ests respond to the advocacy efforts of their opponents, I

examine the dynamics of organized interest involvement

as amicus curiae at the U.S. Supreme Court and assess the

presence of both short-term and long-term responses to

the filing of briefs by the opposition. The Court is an

attractive venue for studying organized interest counter-

action and countermobilization because lobbying efforts

in the form of amicus curiae briefs are public record and

can be observed far back in time. To properly assess the

dynamics of organized interest activity it is critical to

have a valid and reliable measure of advocacy activity

over a meaningful time span.

Prior work examining the involvement of organized

interests at the Supreme Court reveals that a wide variety

of interests file amicus curiae briefs at the Court (Caldeira

and Wright 1990) and that the fundamental compatibility

between institutional features of the judiciary and the

nature of an interest group affects the likelihood of the

group using the courts (Scheppele and Walker 1991).

There is also evidence that the decision to file an amicus

brief is a function of the receptiveness of the Court

(Kobylka 1991), the Court’s need for information

(Hansford 2004a), and the potential for this form of advo-

cacy to allow membership-based groups to attract support

(Hansford 2004b). This line of work has not, however,

directly addressed whether interests respond to their

opponents in a dynamic fashion.

Using data on amicus curiae filings from the 1946 to

2006 terms of the Supreme Court, I estimate vector error

correction (VEC) and vector autoregression (VAR) mod-

els that allow a test of whether advocacy efforts respond,

in a dynamic sense, to the efforts of the “other side.” This

modeling strategy provides a better test of the causal con-

nections between the activities of opposing sets of orga-

nized interests because of the focus on the temporal

sequencing of variation in amicus activity. These dynamic

analyses illuminate the extent to which organized interest

advocacy efforts are responsive to shocks in the level of

activity of opposing interests. Existing research typically

assesses lobbying activity occurring at one point in time,

which makes it difficult to rule out spurious relationships

and pin down causal connections.

The results of the model estimations (using both

pooled and issue-specific data) reveal that organized

interests respond to the advocacy activities of their

opponents in both the short and long term. An increase in

the number of amicus briefs filed on one side leads to an

increase in briefs filed by the other side, in the immedi-

ately following and subsequent Court terms. These results

provide evidence that organized interests exhibit both

short-term counteraction and long-term responsiveness,

consistent with countermobilization, in the face of activ-

ity from their opponents. Consistent with pluralism, inter-

est representation at the Court appears responsive and

perhaps balanced in the long term. It is possible, though,

that institutional characteristics of the judiciary promote

counteraction and countermobilization on the part of

involved interests. Ironically, this would suggest a par-

ticularly democratic, in the pluralistic sense, role for the

Court.

How Do Interests Respond to

the Lobbying Activities of Their

Opponents?

Assume that there are interests, in the most general sense,

on both sides of an issue. How do interests on one side

(to be labeled A, for ease of discussion), which may be

organized and active or may be latent, respond to the

advocacy activities of the other side (B)? More specifi-

cally, how does A respond to the lobbying efforts of B in

a particular venue? The pluralist paradigm views

American politics as centering on the competition

between opposing interests (e.g., Becker 1983; Truman

1951). This active competition over policy outcomes

leads organized interests to be responsive to the lobbying

activities of their opponents. While Olson’s (1965)

famous critique of the assumption that latent interests

will necessarily organize in response to threats took some

of the wind out of the pluralist’s sails, recent work pro-

vides pluralistic, or perhaps neo-pluralistic, theoretical

justifications for the expectation that interests will

respond to the advocacy efforts of their opponents.

Specifically, there are both policy- and organizational-

maintenance-based arguments for the possibility that

organized interests will respond to an increase in the lob-

bying by opponents by increasing their own advocacy

efforts in the same venue. Below, I outline these argu-

ments and indicate how they apply to interest activity at

the Supreme Court.

Policy Motivations and Information

Provision

Dating back to Milbrath (1963), scholars have equated

lobbying with an attempt to influence policy outcomes

through the strategic provision of information to policy

makers. This should be particularly true of the lobbying