Interest Community Influence: A Neopluralist Perspective

In the United States each year organizations spend about $200 million on federal campaign contributions and more than $3 billion on lobbying the federal government (Center for Responsive Politics 2014a, 2014b). Thousands of businesses and other organizations maintain full-time offices in the nation’s capital for the sole purpose of communicating with government. The pattern is repeated at the state and even the local levels. Politicians and the news media decry the power of “special interests,” and political scientists themselves find that organized interests are embedded in all aspects of the policymaking process. And yet, evidence of interest group power often escapes the grasp of systematic research. Although lobbyists make convenient scapegoats, the degree to which organized interests wield influence in politics is far from clear. Scholarly findings are mixed and any power that organized interests may wield is highly contingent.