Interest Groups in the Federal System
Americans have a proclivity for creating and joining groups of all kinds including interest groups. The United States today has more than 1.5 million voluntary, nonprofit organizations, including over 200,000 interest groups. However, during the twenty-first century, data show that formal membership in voluntary organizations has declined. Less clear is the variety of informal and electronic ways in which Americans continue to join with one another for political communication and action. Failing to register as a member of a group does not necessarily mean that people have decided to “bowl alone” (Putnam, 2001 and 2020).
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and press and the rights to assemble and petition the government but not the right explicitly to associate or organize. In NAACP v. Alabama (1958), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech.
Many studies explore why and how Americans form interest groups, how well the groups perform, and how representative and democratic are they. Less studied is how a federalism perspective changes the way we understand interest groups. How does federalism shape the organization and performance of interest groups? How do the 56 federal, state, and territorial interest-group systems compare? How well do interest groups bridge federalism and democracy? In a federal system, how do governments “lobby” one another?
Conceptualizing Interest Groups
Interest groups are often narrowly defined as a type of political association or organized interest that that seeks to influence public policy. This definition however excludes a wide range of organized interests that influence government from a single corporation in a single state (e.g., Anaconda Mining in Montana) to an ad hoc coalition of state attorneys general who organize to fight a federal policy.
A broader definition of interest group is “an association of individuals or organizations or a public or private institution that attempts to influence government decisions” (Nownes and Newmark 2013, 106). The breadth of this definition includes most types of organized interests: individual membership organizations (e.g., professional associations and labor unions), associations of organizational members (e.g., chambers of commerce), single-issue organizations with staff and no members (e.g., Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund), public institutions (e.g., a state university or a city), and private institutions (e.g., a corporation or private hospital). Many of these organizations maintain a permanent government affairs office that monitors relevant government decisions and seeks to influence some of those decisions. Are they “interest groups” or simply other entities that may join with interest groups in a lobbying campaign? This is a difficult question, but there is a need to include them, however categorized, in analyzing the influence of organized interests.
There also may be a need to broaden our definition to include a wider range of group goals. Interest groups lobby legislatures for or against policy decisions, but they also serve as litigants (or friends of litigants) in court as in National League of Cities (NLC) v. Usery and National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) v. Sebelius (NFIB) v. Sebelius (Waltenburg and Swinford, 1999); they testify for or against public appointments in their field of interest; they monitor bids on government contracts and grants; they influence proposed government regulations; and some groups make financial campaign contributions and otherwise support candidates for elected office.
Organization
Social scientists and historians have long noted that interest groups mirror the federal system in both their organization and performance. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in his classic work on America as a nation of joiners, wrote that civic and political associations organized themselves in the early republic in ways that echoed “the Federal political system, with local units loosely linked together in state branches and these in turn sending representatives to a national body” (1944, 11).
The Independence Movement of the 1770s was organized along federal lines starting with local committees of correspondence. Later, the constitutional ratification debate of 1787 – 1788 was organized by both Federalist and Anti-Federalist committees. Although James Madison engineered the Federalist strategy from Virginia, he used a veritable pony express to communicate with leaders of Federalist committees in the states and important counties. Anti-Federalists also had their state and local committees. Furthermore, on each side, the committees interacted with one another as an ad hoc federated system.
Urbanization, industrialization, and migration in the nineteenth century did not alter the federated nature of most organizations. Theda Skocpol found that most of America’s very large voluntary organizations were nationwide, federated, membership based, and membership controlled (2000, 529). In other words, America’s largest interest groups did not begin locally and become national. Nor did they begin nationally. They were federated from the start.
Skocpol offers two sets of reasons why federated national-state-local organizations have been so common. The first is “organizational imitation” in which interest groups and other nongovernmental organizations mimicked the organization of the federal system of government. The second is “political opportunity structures,” namely, federated interest groups could more easily interact with federal, state, and or local governments (2000, 533). That interaction cut both ways; federated groups gained readier access to all planes or arenas of governments (federal, state, and local) and governments could enlist the services of groups in helping implement public policy.
This federated structure of interest groups began to change in the 1960s for many but not all groups. Burdett Loomis and Allan Cigler summarize these changes as including dramatic increases in the number and proliferation of groups; greater concentration of national group headquarters in Washington, DC; increased use of electronic and internet technology in information and communication; increased specialization of groups and the rise of single-issue groups; changes in campaign-finance laws and the rise of political action committees (PACs); deeper interest-group penetration of government bureaucracies; the decline of political parties (in their hold on voters and candidates) during the late twentieth century creating more opportunities for interest groups in electoral and policy-related activities; the increase of so-called “public interest groups” such as Common Cause; the growth and impact of individual institutions (such as corporations, universities, state and local governments, and foreign interests); and the increased range and sophistication of interest-group activity in state capitals due to increases in federal grants and state budgets (2016, pp. 1 -2).
Before the 1960s, most of the largest groups were federated and mirrored the federal system with offices in local communities, the states, and nationally. Moreover, those organizations were membership based and controlled. Their officers were elected and influential inside the organization. Since 1960, membership has declined in many interest groups as they have in other civic and political associations. Also, many new interest groups formed without members. At the same time, membership in peak organizations such as the National Rife Association has skyrocketed as has the growth of non-membership, specialized organizations in Washington, DC, that are run by professional staff. These changes mirror and reinforce the growth and impact of the national government over this period.
Influence
Scholars differ widely on how to assess the “influence” of interests in the American federal system. Some see that influence as minimal, especially in a partisan age when political parties are exerting more control over their legislative members’ votes on bills. Others see interest groups, large corporations, PACs, and dark money controlling American elected officials and their policy decisions by a combination of lobbying and campaign contributions.
Notwithstanding these differences, most scholars tend to agree on a few points about interest-group power. Interest groups with large financial resources are in a better position to mount effective lobbying efforts or campaign-finance contributions in federal, state, and local arenas. Business groups and firms have more interest groups with more financial resources than other interests do. Labor unions, including public employee unions, and public teacher organizations also have significant financial resources. However, when it comes to influencing state legislatures, most studies rank public school teacher organizations as the most influential in most states with business groups second. In Congress, one study found the National Education Association (NEA) as one of the strongest interest groups (Box-Steffensmeier, Christenson, and Craig 2019).
Interest groups with many members (e.g., the AARP and the National Rifle Association) have more clout with legislators who see those members as influential voters in their districts. Networking capacity also counts; interest-group access increases if their lobbyists, leaders, and members have strong contacts with legislators and their staff and have the technical expertise to advise legislative staff on bills.
Some research indicates that successful groups that bring about national change emerge from grassroots sources and “plow through all fifty states with their change campaigns, rather than focusing only on sweeping federal reforms” (Crutchfield 2018,12). For example, drunk-driving reduction, tobacco control, same-sex marriage, and gun rights. Such groups “win big when their grass-tops are organized in networked leadership structures—coalitions of leaders who recognize they need to forge pathways so all of the players around them can collaborate rather than compete and achieve collective impact” (Crutchfield 2018, 13; Tufekci 2019).
Affiliated state and local groups need to be able to exercise significantly autonomous initiatives. For example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), founded in 1980, had more than 450 local chapters and two million members in 1985. The National Rifle Association focused on grassroots organizing in the early 1990s and describes itself as an inverted pyramid with the state and local organizations on top. By contrast, the less successful Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence focused on lobbying the federal government and had little presence in the states.
Scholars also agree on the importance of the legislative issues themselves. Hence, it is easier to lobby on technical and noncontroversial issues that attract less public attention, and it is easier to lobby for a position that preserves the status quo than to advocate for change.
As to interest-group influence, most scholars agree that financial campaign contributions give groups more “access” to legislative members and their staff. Most scholars also agree that greater access provides a competitive advantage over other groups without such access. Where scholars differ is whether such access leads to influence.
Federalism and Democracy
The debate over interest groups and democracy has its roots in the early decades of the American republic. James Madison in The Federalist No. 10 may have left some doubt on whether all interest groups are factious. But in his pre-Convention “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” he examined state governments as a home of majority factionalism, and the diversity of interests in the states as a check on that factionalism. George Washington did not see organized interests in such a positive light. In his Farewell Address of 1796, he put the democratic case against interest groups most forcefully by categorically equating them with factions and hence a danger to popular government:
The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government. . . . [A]ll combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; . . . to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
A generation later, the French political observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, offered an alternative view. In Democracy in America (1840, Part 2, chapter 7), he wrote:
There is only one nation on earth [the United States] where the unlimited liberty of associating for political ends is used daily. This same nation is the only one in the world where the citizens have imagined making continual use of the right of association in civil life and have succeeded in gaining in this way all the good things civilization can offer. . . . A political association draws a multitude of people out of themselves at the same time . . . So political associations can be considered as great free schools, where all citizens come to learn the general theory of associations. . . . When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. . . . This leads me naturally to think that liberty of association in political matters is not as dangerous for public tranquility as is supposed. . . .
George Washington’s argument, the so-called factionalist argument, holds that interest groups (and political parties) are naturally corrupting forces that represent special interests that threaten the common good. Tocqueville’s pluralistic argument is that interest groups teach people the art of association in which they discover that they can achieve more together than separately. A third argument, the elitist argument, finds an unacceptable disparity in the strength of interest groups operating on an unlevel playing field dominated by wealthy business interests. As one of its leading proponents, E. E. Schattschneider opined, “the flaw of the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent” (1960, 35).
How does federalism figure into these three theories? For moderate factionalists like Madison, federalism reduces the danger of majority factionalism; namely, the idea that a majority could form against the rights of a minority. For pluralists, federalism reduces the danger of centralization and homogeneity. For elitists, federalism has no effect in reducing the influence of big money in politics.
“Intergovernmental lobbying” provides a final perspective on interest groups in the federal system. In theory, the federal government and the states are envisioned as constitutional “partners” in the American federal system. However, at least in the reality of federal policymaking , the states are typically seen as one more set of interests in the parade of interests seeking to lobby Congress and the president. Scholars use the term “intergovernmental lobbying” to refer to this phenomenon in which state and local officials individually or through their representative associations, such as the National Governors Association, are relegated to the ranks of interest groups and lobby Congress and the president on public policy positions (e.g., Cammisa 1995). There is a double irony here: first that partners are reduced to groups and forced to lobby one another; and second that state groups typically lose in the game of lobbying because fifty governors lack the electoral clout of large membership organizations like the National Education Association.
| BIBLIOGRAPHY: Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Dino P. Christenson, and Alison W. Craig, “Cue-Taking in Congress: Interest Group Signals from Dear Colleague Letters,” American Journal of Political Science 63 (1) (2019): 163-180; Anne Marie Cammisa, Governments as Interest Groups: Intergovernmental Lobbying and the Federal System (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995); Leslie R. Crutchfield, How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don’t (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2018); Anthony Nownes and Adam Newmark, “Interest Groups in the States,” in Virginia Gray, Russell Hanson, and Thad Kousser, eds. Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis, 11th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013), pp. 105 – 131; Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., “The Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” American Historical Review 50 (October 1944): 1 – 25; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001) and The Upswing: How American Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020); Theda Skocpol, “The Institutional Origins of Civic Volunteerism in the United States,” American Political Science Review 94 (3) (September 2000): 527 – 546; Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Clive Thomas, Ronald Hrebenar, and Anthony Nownes, “Interest Group Politics in the States: Four Decades of Developments, 1960 to the Present,” Book of the States: 2008 (Lexington, KY: Council of State Governments, 2009), pp. 322 – 331; Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press 2019); and Eric Waltenburg and Bill Swinford, Litigating Federalism: The States Before the U.S. Supreme Court (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). |
Stephen Schechter
Updated: October 2021
SEE ALSO: Interest-Group System