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Polarized Pluralism: Organizational Preferences and Biases in the American Pressure System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2020

JESSE M. CROSSON Open the ORCID record for JESSE M. CROSSON [Opens in a new window] ,
ALEXANDER C. FURNAS Open the ORCID record for ALEXANDER C. FURNAS [Opens in a new window]  and
GEOFFREY M. LORENZ Open the ORCID record for GEOFFREY M. LORENZ [Opens in a new window]
JESSE M. CROSSON*
Affiliation:
Princeton University and Trinity University
ALEXANDER C. FURNAS*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
GEOFFREY M. LORENZ*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
*
Jesse M. Crosson, Research Fellow, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and Assistant Professor (on leave), Department of Political Science, Trinity University, jcrosson@trinity.edu.
Alexander C. Furnas, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, zfurnas@umich.edu.
Geoffrey M. Lorenz, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, gmlorenz@unl.edu.
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Abstract

For decades, critics of pluralism have argued that the American interest group system exhibits a significantly biased distribution of policy preferences. We evaluate this argument by measuring groups’ revealed preferences directly, developing a set of ideal point estimates, IGscores, for over 2,600 interest groups and 950 members of Congress on a common scale. We generate the scores by jointly scaling a large dataset of interest groups’ positions on congressional bills with roll-call votes on those same bills. Analyses of the scores uncover significant heterogeneity in the interest group system, with little conservative skew and notable inter-party differences in preference correspondence between legislators and ideologically similar groups. Conservative bias and homogeneity reappear, however, when weighting IGscores by groups’ PAC contributions and lobbying expenditures. These findings suggest that bias among interest groups depends on the extent to which activities like PAC contributions and lobbying influence policymakers’ perceptions about the preferences of organized interests.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 1117 - 1137
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

The authors thank Amy Cesal, Alton Worthington, Kevin Quinn, Christopher Fariss, Kevin McAlister, John Jackson, Brian Richter, Richard Hall, Julia Payson, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Adam Bonica, and participants at the University of Michigan Interdisciplinary Workshop on American Politics, Political Economy Workshop at the Harris School of Public Policy, and the Political Behavior Research Group at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for their helpful feedback, comments, and assistance in this project. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6AAGM9.

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