We examine scholarship on the role and influence of advocacy organizations in the U.S. political process. We identify common theoretical questions in the disconnected literatures on social movements, interest groups, and nonprofits, and we propose a unifying conceptual framework for examining advocacy organizations. Focusing on the post-1960s growth in advocacy organizations, we examine major organizational characteristics including organizational structures, membership and participation, resources, and interorganizational networks and coalitions. Our analysis of organizational influence focuses on five dimensions of the policy process: (a) agenda setting, (b) access to decision-making arenas, (c) achieving favorable policies, (d) monitoring and shaping implementation, and (e) shifting the long-term priorities and resources of political institutions. Finally, we identify recurrent theoretical and methodological problems, including the compartmentalization of research within disciplines, an overreliance on...

Advocacy Organizations in the U.S. Political Process

This article examines the way in which the news media frame public policy issues and the extent to which other political players (e.g., interest groups, politicians) influence this issue framing process. Our analysis focuses on the issue of gun control, comparing the rhetoric generated by interest groups and public officials on the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban with actual network news coverage of this legislation from 1988 to 1996. Results indicate that both sets of political players employed several interpretative issue frames and worked hard to put their preferred themes on the agenda. However, at times, the media intervened in the framing process, especially as the debate matured. Specifically, the news media (a) structured the overall tone of the gun control debate, (b) adopted a distribution of framing perspectives different from that of politicians and interest groups, and (c) packaged policy discourse more often than not in terms of the "culture of violence" theme. These findings point toward...

Assessing the Democratic Debate: How the News Media Frame Elite Policy Discourse

This article addresses three questions about notice and comment rule rrmaking. The first considers who participates: Who submits comments to federal agencies during the notice and comment period? The second considers the extent to which the comments alter the content of the rules. The third is about evaluating agency rule making in the context of the iron triangle and issue network models of policy making. The article examines eleven rules selected randomly at the EPA, NHTSA, and HUD. Among the findings are. a dearth of citizen commenters, the predominance of participation by business interests, and the presence of issue networks, and the absence of any discernible bias in whose voices get heard. The article concludes by suggesting that agencies fail to hear from all affected parties but that they are nonetheless put in the precarious position of arbitrating among competing interests.

Interest Groups in the Rule-Making Process: Who Participates? Whose Voices Get Heard?

Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. This study, the first comprehensive treatment of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality in opinion surveys, suggests some surprising answers. Knowledge does matter, and the way it is distributed in society can cause collective preferences to reflect disproportionately the opinions of some groups more than others. Sometimes collective preferences seem to represent something like the will of the people, but frequently they do not. Sometimes they rigidly enforce political equality in the expression of political viewpoints, but often they do not. The primary culprit is not any inherent shortcoming in the methods of survey research. Rather, it is the limited degree of knowledge held by ordinary citizens about public affairs. Accounting for these factors can help better appreciate thepossibilities for using opinion polls to represent the people's voice.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/20998/sample/9780521820998ws.pdf

Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People

A key issue for interest groups and policymakers is the ways through which organized interests voice their interests and influence public policy. This article combines two perspectives on interest group representation to explain patterns of interest group access to different political arenas. From a resource exchange perspective, it argues that access to different political arenas is discrete as it is determined by the match between the supply and demands of interest groups and gatekeepers—politicians, bureaucrats, and reporters. From a partly competing perspective, it is argued that access is cumulative and converges around wealthy and professionalized groups. Based on a large-scale investigation of group presence in Danish political arenas, the analyses show a pattern of privileged pluralism. This describes a system where multiple political arenas provide opportunities for multiple interests but where unequally distributed resources produce cumulative effects (i.e., the same groups have high levels of arena access).

/pdf/interest-group-access-to-the-bureaucracy-parliament-and-the-3ya32gufx0.pdf

Interest Group Access to the Bureaucracy, Parliament, and the Media

The work of E. E. Schattschneider (1960) and others suggests that there may be systematic biases or unrepresentativeness in the voices that interest groups contribute to public deliberation about policy. Evidence from hundreds of TV news stories concerning 80 diverse policy issues from the 1969-82 period indicates that corporations and business groups predominated (especially on economic issues), with 36.5% of all interest group mentions, contrasted with only 13.2% for labor. Professional and agricultural interests were rarely heard from. Citizen action groups had 32% of all interest group stories, but these often concerned unpopular protest activity. Such imbalances, apparently resulting from differential command of money and other resources, seem to violate norms of equal access, representativeness, balance, and diversity in the marketplace of ideas.

Danielian, Lucig H.~Page, Benjamin I.

Papers

The heavenly chorus: interest group voices on TV news