Politics
Interest Groups in a Hyper-Partisan World
Interest Groups in a Hyper-Partisan World
Jeffrey M. Berry
Little in the governmental process seems more stable than interest group politics. Indeed, James Madison warned against the inevitability of interest groups (which, artfully, he called “factions”) in the Federalist. Acknowledging human behavior, Madison said that if we are to live in the free society envisioned in the Constitution, then people will use that freedom to advocate on behalf of their own self-interest. Americans have been doing so ever since.
But while advocacy is a constant, its form has certainly evolved over time. The policymaking iron triangles immortalized in 1950s political science have long vanished. The campaign finance reforms of the 1970s catalyzed greater interest group spending on elections. We are now in a period of changing interest group politics as well, though with the exception of Citizens United, there aren’t obvious landmarks to denote the changes that are taking place.
More than anything else, today’s interest group environment stems from the transformation of American politics into a system characterized by hyper-partisanship. Partisanship and polarization have always been present in our system but what bipartisanship coexisted seems to have largely evaporated. It’s not clear when this started — perhaps with Gingrich years in the House — but America is long past the days when Republican House leader Bob Michel worked easily with Democratic House leader Tip O’Neill (and the two even played a lot of golf together).
The primary consequence of a partisan system for interest groups is that it creates winner-take-all elections for them. That is, control of the Congress and the White House can mean everything in terms of groups’ ability to win or block legislation and regulations. Although this reliance was always the reality for some groups, labor unions and ideological citizen groups for example, access and success is ever more dependent now on being on the winning side of the most recent election. As Ray La Raja and Brian Schaffner note, “The surest strategy for groups is to help elect people who agree with them.”
This dynamic is fundamentally at odds with how interest group scholars have long described the lobbying world. A prevailing model of interest groups and policymaking is that of issue networks, each a large constellation of stakeholders who interact on an ongoing basis with each other and with policymakers to shape policy options. This conceptual framework does not take elections and politics out of lobbying, but it does portray policymaking as more consensual where opposing groups search together for solutions and place great value on research and policy expertise.
This world does not exist anymore. Interest groups still operate in coalitions but broad consensus among stakeholders is not nearly as important as whether those in the majority in Congress support their point of view. This places ever more incentive on interest groups to raise campaign funds to help their candidates’ side win the most votes.
Some interest groups still use their bundling, PAC donations, and leaders’ individual contributions to try to maintain access to both parties in Congress. Yet favorable lobbying access to the minority party has limited value these days. What seems to supersede this long-term pattern of “don’t burn your bridges” advocacy, is one of tighter alliances among parties, conventional interest groups, and super PACs.
This is not an arrangement of equals, though, as parties are the central actors.
As Kathleen Bawn and her colleagues write, contemporary “parties in the United States are best understood as coalitions of interest groups and activists seeking to capture and use government for their particular goals, which range from material self-interest to high-minded idealism.” The boundaries between advocates and parties have fused more closely than ever. When Republican Rick Saccone ran for an open congressional seat in a special election in Pennsylvania in 2018, he raised just under $1 million for his campaign while super PACs and the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee spent $14 million on his behalf. A super PAC funded by conservative mega-donor Joe Ricketts ran ads that mimicked the ads for Saccone financed by a super PAC controlled by then Speaker Paul Ryan. A similar liberal alliance supported Democrat Conor Lamb, the eventual winner.
Academics are always updating their findings, their models, their explanations of whatever phenomenon they study and there is no shortage of excellent scholarship on interest groups that is being published these days. Contemporary work is notable for its rigor and the interest group subfield strikes me as much larger and more expansive in its reach than when I first started working in this area many years ago. That said, the work by Bawn and the UCLA School on parties and groups has not led to the kind of broad rethinking of the field that it promised. That’s unfortunate.
It may be that the questions posed about party-interest group-super PAC alliances are too broad to be easily incorporated into tractable research designs. Such inquiry is really about the nature of political power, no small undertaking. Another issue is that much of the coordination and aggregation of large-scale campaign spending or donations by organized groups goes on in secret beyond the research lenses of political scientists. Our insight into super PAC behavior is limited because we generally have no access to the principals and they leave little or no paper trail about their strategies and goals.
Clearly, there’s a rich research agenda ahead of us if we’re to fully understanding the modern interest group world.
This essay is adapted from Jeffrey M. Berry, “Interest Groups and Elections,” in The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, Elizabeth Suhay, Bernard Grofman, and Alexander H. Trechsel, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)
Jeffrey M. Berry is Skuse Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. Follow at @JeffreyMBerry
Key words: interest groups lobby advocacy partisanship super PAC
