Dissertation

Read the most recent draft of my job market paper on interest group influence on committee agendas.

Prioritized Interests: Why Congressional Committees Address Some Problems and Ignore Others

Lobbying is ubiquitous throughout the legislative process, but we know surprisingly little about how it influences the fate of legislation. In my dissertation, I focus on how the sets of bills considered and ignored in congressional committees are shaped by committee chairmen and interest group coalitions. Both popular and scholarly critiques maintain that expert committee leaders are constrained to serve partisan or majoritarian interests, and that wealthy interest groups dominate less-wealthy interests in the legislative process. My dissertation calls these accounts into question by examining several aspects of the relationships between legislators’ issue priorities, interest group lobbying, and agenda-setting in congressional committees.

I examine how committees come to address particular problems with legislation, across three substantive papers. First, I find that while committee leaders may be more constrained in their agenda-setting powers than in the past, they can still direct their committee’s attention to issue areas that they prioritize personally. To do so, I examine changes in committees’ issue agendas after a sitting chair died or left office and was subsequently replaced by a new chair. I find that committees’ agendas correspond to the new chair’s personal issue priorities as well as the ongoing issue priorities of the committee.

In the second and third parts of the dissertation, I examine how interest group lobbying influences chairs’ agenda-setting decisions with respect to individual bills. In the second paper, I develop the concept of interest diversity as the relative degree of observable variety of social identities, political causes, or industries represented by set of organizations. Using new data on interest groups’ positions on over 5000 bills introduced during the

109th to 113th Congresses, I develop and validate a measure for interest diversity among groups lobbying on a bill. I show that the net interest diversity on a bill, the difference in supporters’ and opponents’ interest diversities, varies in ways that are both consistent with general predictions about interest group activity as well as with well-understood patterns of legislative and interest group behavior.

In the third paper, I examine how bills’ net interest diversity impacts the legislative agendas of congressional committees. I argue that committee chairs’ incentives to promote viable legislation induce them to favor bills garnering the support of a diverse array of causes and industries, who are in turn able to mobilize the sustained support and attention of many legislators. I find that bills with higher net interest diversity are more likely to be considered in committee. I then show how these associations vary across bill sponsors and party alignments between Congress and the White House. Taken together, these results suggest

that interest group influence, and what makes interest groups influential, is moderated by legislative institutions and may be more benign than is commonly assumed.