Polarized Pluralism: Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System

• In Event: Interest Group Preferences and Party Agendas

Abstract

For decades, much has been made of purported ideological biases of interest groups and the influence they have on American politics. In such depictions, the interest group community is dominated by center-right interests. We evaluate this conventional wisdom by introducing a new set of preference measures, "IGscores," for over 2,600 interest groups. To do so, we jointly scale a large data set of interest-group position-taking on bills before Congress with roll call votes on the same bills, developing a set of scores that includes both donating and non-donating groups, on the same scale as over 950 members of Congress. After validating these scores against expectations about the behavior of particular organizations and industries, we show that the interest community we capture differs substantially from that depicted in previous scholarship. This community exhibits more polarization, far less conservative skew, and systematic differences between donating and non-donating groups, with the surprisingly small population of donating interests appearing notably more conservative overall. In addition, we examine the distribution of preferences weighted by different indicators of interest intensity; while the most active groups are more polarized than the overall population of groups, wealthier interests (in terms of PAC activity and especially lobby expenditures) exhibit more conservative skew. These findings speak to longstanding debates about interest representation and clarify the stakes of understanding what makes individual organizations influential in American politics. We conclude by highlighting some of the many potential applications of IGscores to the study of interest groups and legislative politics.

Authors

• Jesse M. Crosson, Princeton University and Trinity University

• Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan

• Geoffrey M. Lorenz, University of Nebraska, Lincoln