American interest groups are increasingly lining up behind the Democratic or Republican Party and trying to build coalitions within those parties rather than across them. But historically, that has not been the most effective method to bring policy change. Jesse Crosson finds that interest groups are increasingly taking positions on issues outside their areas of expertise in an effort to unite their partisan coalitions. They are facing pressure to toe the party line, but it might prevent the broader coalitions they need to build to pass legislation.
Guest: Jesse Crosson, Purdue University
Study: Taking Sides
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Counterproductive interest group polarization this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. American interest groups are increasingly lining up behind the Democratic or Republican Party and trying to build coalitions within those parties rather than across them. But historically, that hasn’t been the most effective method for bringing policy change. Why are interest groups polarizing and is it working to their benefit? This week, I talked to Jesse Crosson of Purdue University about his book in progress with Geoff Lorenz and Xander Furnas, Taking Sides. He finds that interest groups are increasingly taking positions on issues outside their areas of expertise in an effort to unite their partisan coalitions. They’re facing pressure to tow the party line, but it prevents the broader coalitions they need to pass legislation. Crosson is also an expert on changes in Congress and political reforms to build capacity. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation. So tell us about the major findings and takeaways so far from the book project Taking Sides?
Jesse Crosson: Yeah, thanks so much, Matt. So I think the common view of interest groups today is that they’re polarizers, that they’re in some ways responsible for the mess that we are currently finding ourselves in in terms of teamsmanship and polarization. And this stands in contrast to the historical view of interest groups as well, special interests, so idiosyncratic, parochial. And what we have found is that in the modern time period, that they really have sort of themselves into left, right teams and ones that have their preferences really well characterized by a single dimension. But what we find in the book is that this really was not always the case, that it wasn’t until about the 1990s when groups started to exhibit this type of well-sorted behavior.
So the remainder of the book sort of interrogates this rise, who’s driving it, when they’re driving it, and so forth. So we find for example, that this rise in group partisanship not only coincides with the rise in insecure majorities and the growth and importance of party branding and so forth, but that groups engage in this sort of sorted behavior the most whenever their core issue area becomes really tied to one party brand or the other. We provide evidence that the way that they sort of signal their loyalty to one party coalition or another is by engaging in what some call mission creep. So taking positions outside your core area of interest in a way that is consistent with the party coalition of one or the other parties.
We show not only that this is increasing over time, but as I said, whenever your core issue area becomes more tied to one party brand or another, that you’re much more likely to engage in this type of behavior early on. We also find that money doesn’t insulate you. So just because you’re giving in terms of campaign donations, that under most conditions, you are expected to show party loyalty across both position taking and political giving. And we also find that coalition building within the policymaking process is affected by this increase in partisanship that the sort of information that members of Congress are able to extract from the support and opposition coalitions that they observe is different in an era of high interest group partisanship than perhaps it was in previous eras.
Matt Grossmann: So this project builds on some prior work that you all published outlining the benefits of the data on position taking originally from MapLight and then trying to scale interest groups ideologically. So what did you learn from the initial round and how are things changing as you’re now trying to create these dynamic understanding of interest groups?
Jesse Crosson: Yeah, so the purpose of that paper as you preface there was really to examine left, right representation among interest groups active in Washington, testing some you long-standing claims about what that distribution might look like, and most of the paper is focused on looking at those distributions and weighing and reweighing them by different activities. But one thing that really stuck out to us and served as the jumping off point for this book was just how easily you could classify the preferences of special interests in a single dimension. And in fact, just sort of mathematically, you could do it at a higher rate in those data for interest groups and you could members of Congress who are actual partisans. So that really stuck out to us and was the jumping off point for the book, why is this the case? We didn’t figure that it always was the case. So when did it develop and why?
So that was sort of the jumping off point. We also felt like that it pointed to a disconnect between the sorts of special interests that we all think about and that we all learn about in sort of canonical theories of interest group behavior, many of which were developed in the ’70s, ’80s, and even the ’90s, and that really groups might be facing a fundamentally different environment today than what they were facing whenever we were building a lot of these theories. And so those were two really important things that came out of that paper and that we’ve interrogated in this book. It’s worth noting another thing that came out of the paper that we take up a little bit in the book that I think could be taken up a lot more is that there is really very little overlap between the groups of interest groups who engage in different behaviors.
So the groups that lobby only overlap with groups that give in terms of campaign finance by like 14, 15% depending on how you estimate those things. I mean, that’s a really small overlap, and in my mind, there’s not enough literature out there explaining why there’s so little overlap, how those communities, if you want to call them that, differ in important ways. And we find that that’s true for position taking too. Now I would say there’s a lot more overlap between lobbying interests and position taking interests because those tend to be related activities, but even still, understanding how and why there’s so little overlap with something that came both out of that paper and has continued into the book project.
Matt Grossmann: And is there any update to the findings from that paper, that there’s a lot of interest group representation on the left, but that there’s a lot of money on the right?
Jesse Crosson: It’s pretty similar throughout the time period, except that a lot of the mass of the distribution in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s is in the middle. So instead of the normal bimodal distribution that we’re used to seeing in American politics, you sort of see a much more unimodal distribution. You can see over time these little left and rightward modes developing and that middle is shrinking. But across the time period though, you do see that there is coverage left and right encompassing where the left and the right is approximately for members of Congress. You really don’t see, at least among the groups that we’re able to capture in our data, there does not appear to be a whole lot of obvious… Well, there’s tons of conservative groups in this area and there’s tons of liberal groups in this area.
Instead again, they group toward the middle. Now whether or not that means that they’re moderate, we’re pretty agnostic to it. In fact, I would say they’re not necessarily modern, it’s just that their preferences are not so easily characterized by a single dimension, that maybe they’ve got really strong preferences on their thing that they care about, their particular issue, but they’re more willing to horse trade on the other issues to get where they want to be.
Matt Grossmann: So tell us a little bit about the story behind this book in collaboration. I know that you all have known each other from a long time, but studies somewhat different pieces of the political system. So how did the different interests come together here?
Jesse Crosson: For sure. So we’ve known each other since grad school. I slept on Geoff’s couch for recruitment weekend, and so we really do go back to square one. I would say that I came into grad school more as a straight-up Congress guy. I wanted to study Congress and policymaking. And I came to realize pretty quickly by working and learning with Geoff and Xander and then also studying under Rick Hall, that I couldn’t pursue the topics I wanted to pursue or understand the things that I wanted to understand without understanding what interest groups were doing, that this was something that was really missing from my understanding of political institutions, but especially of Congress. So just as a sort of baseline, what I’ve learned from those guys is they both came in much more, I think, interested in interest groups than what I was, and they really helped to push me in that direction and I haven’t looked back.
In terms of what we bring to the collaboration and why we’ve worked well together. So it is the case that we have a lot of overlapping skills. We do a lot of the same things well. I think we can all sort of individually handle each aspect of the project, but we definitely have comparative advantages that we’ve been able to identify. So Geoff is super careful theoretically, and he is one that is able to slow Xander and I down sometimes and saying, “Oh, wait a minute, is that really the thing that we want to measure? Is that exactly the concept that we’re after?” Which is super, super useful, particularly in a book project where if you start in on trying to capture the wrong thing and get too far down that path, you’ve wasted a lot of time.
Xander’s taught a ton to me about how to analyze and code things a lot faster. He tends to be up on the cutting edge of a variety of measurement and technical tools and has been really useful to me in that way. And then just the timing of this project. This project started a while ago, which I know you know Matt and have ribbed me about from time to time. But I started this project when I was a visiting scholar at Princeton. And so one thing that enabled me to do was really, it was my job to do this research. I didn’t have any teaching, I didn’t have any mentorship responsibilities. It was just to start this project.
And it really allowed me to step back and think about what was the message of the research, what was the basic frame, the thing that I wanted people to be able to take away if we were right, if we found the things we thought we were going to find in the data. And so that’s something I think that I’ve been able to bring to the collaboration is a big picture, what is the basic argument that we want people to associate with the project? So that’s just at least a little bit of a glimpse of how we’ve come to figure out roles in this collaboration. And it was really helpful to start out in grad school where we were all starting on the same footing and could figure things out, make mistakes and all that kind of thing altogether and all at once and be able to build up as a team.
Matt Grossmann: So you find that interest groups polarized after legislators, really not until the 1990s. This enters a crowded space of explaining polarization, obviously. And one of the interesting things about this is that a lot of the people who are blaming or crediting groups go back a lot further than that, but a lot of their evidence stems from things like party platforms and activists in the early piece of this. So how should we bring those things together? Your evidence that in position taking, this was a pretty late process versus others evidence that in some of the organizing of the parties, the interest groups were early players.
Jesse Crosson: So I think this is a hugely important question, and one area that we don’t do in the book, but I’d like to explore further in future work, and I hope others are interested as well, which is I think there’s some work to be done on who the activists and organizers are and how they differ either within or beside the organizations that we’re studying who are mostly doing their work in government. So of course when you think about parties as organization, parties in government and so on and so forth, you have to wonder if there’s something similar going on with organizations. You have your activist types, your on-the-ground types who are working outside of government, are they one and the same as the people who are doing the lobbying and meeting with members of Congress and setting what the group’s positions are going to be on legislation after a long process of negotiation and so forth?
I suspect that those are potentially, and it’s probably overlap, but it’s potentially different groups of people, and I think it’d be really interesting to figure out ways to piece those apart. Again, we don’t deal with that in the book, but that’s one area that I suspect we might be actually talking about different groups of people even within the same organization. The other thing I would say is that the idea behind expanding your position, taking outside your core area is to really tie the hands of what you’re able to do in Washington. So you ask why is it the case that groups could no longer come together post-election to pass policy? Well, it’s because if you’re taking positions on these really high partisanship issues that’s consistent with one part or the other in an era of insecure majorities, you may well be closing off opportunities to be able to work with one side or the other. One other thing I just want to point out, coming back to the question of how do we square our story with previous research in this area-
… where our story with previous research in this area. I strongly suspect that there is a situation where group strategists do things for strategic reasons, that they bundle issues together for strategic reasons, for electoral reasons, whatever they are, but they understand that there are four electoral reasons. That they’re taking these positions for strategic reasons. But that after a generation of activists, after a generation of people who run for office, whoever, are socialized in an era where this issue goes with this issue and this issue goes with this issue and, of course, this organization has this position in this issue, that it no longer is a strategic or politically convenient decision that is made. That it actually is something that people will, “Of course, these issues go together. That’s clearly, that’s the way it’s always been.” When, in fact, that may not have always been the case.
That doesn’t answer the differences in our developmental story versus the ones that you’re mentioning. But it does, I think, help to explain why groups today seem to be such partisan actors and why people seem to have forgotten that that was not always the case.
Matt Grossmann: Your theory and evidence, as you said, focuses on groups taking positions outside of their core areas of interest to match their party coalition. And you refer to this as signaling and providing both opportunities to signal to the end party, but also to turn off the out party. But I wonder why that really does foreclose any more direct policy, influential coalition building. It seems like legislators who are clearly affiliated with a party, all the time, still try to find bipartisan allies. Ted Cruz and AOC know that they’re on different sides, but that’s why they might want to co-sponsor something together.
And at least for my own prior work in the early Bush administration, a lot of groups that did get involved in elections still, when it came to policymaking, knew that what do you want to have? You want to have the major unions and the chamber behind the effort if you want to try to pass policy. Why doesn’t that kind of policymaking logic still hold?
Jesse Crosson: I would say that it does, it’s just harder to put those coalitions together today than what it used to be, even during the Bush administration. What we find is that, when you can get those, what we would call, partisan diverse coalitions together, that they’re as effective as they’ve always been, maybe even more effective than they’ve been because the signal is so strong that, holy cow, you’re able to bring together not just Republican and Democratic leaning groups, but polarized Republican and Democratic leaning groups in this hyper partisan era in which we live.
But what the sorting does and what the signaling does is that it makes it harder to put those coalitions together. It makes it more difficult for the members to do the directed reaching out to groups who are so often on the opposite side of other issues. But it also makes it hard for the groups to do it as well because they’re seeing these signals that, hey, we’re not interested in working across partisan lines and so on and so forth. Even then, I would say, if you talk to lobbyists today, many of them would say I would love to be able to play both sides, but they would also tell you that it’s a lot harder than it used to be.
And to go back to the point I just made about… In as much as this process has actually changed the character of the memberships of these groups, I’ve heard, anecdotally, that groups, if they do this, have to keep it quiet, have to keep it secret that, for example, the NRA is working on preserving land out west with the Defenders of Wildlife. I don’t think the NRA is going to want their membership knowing that it’s Defenders of Wildlife. This intense signaling, where you’re just constantly saying I’m Team Red, I’m Team Blue, makes it very difficult to keep these coalitions together, particularly over a prolonged policymaking process.
Matt Grossmann: And just to go back to your mechanism of the taking positions on less salient issues, and I do understand why that leads to the interest groups appearing polarized in your data, but as you said, it may not be that, on their core issues, they’re further apart than they used to be. Is there more of an opening here because the mechanism is really on these secondary issues?
Jesse Crosson: Yes, I would say there is still an opening for working together. The question is whether… A piece we haven’t really talked about here is whether the party you’re allied with… Okay, you’re allied with the Republican Party. The concern from the Republican Party is, if I’m a Republican-allied group and I’m working all the time with Democrats, that I’m aiding and abetting the enemy. We’re in this war of all against all, or at least left against right, to try to control the institution. And if I’m helping them meet their policy goals, I’m pushing in the wrong direction. I’m helping the wrong side here. And that could cause concerns for, in this case, the Republican Party and may get them to play hardball with you. Say, if you don’t knock it off, we may not move on your core issues.
Now, of course, it’s really hard to test that at scale, whether or not they’re actually holding groups hostage in that way, but I can tell you, I’ve definitely heard anecdotal evidence of this kind. Basically either you’re for us or you’re against us, and, if you don’t knock it off with this cross-partisan stuff, you may find it really difficult for us to prioritize your issue moving forward. In our mind, that is one of the off-the-equilibrium path risks that a group faces, particularly whenever their issue becomes really tied to the party’s brand.
If you’re in transportation or something like that, that’s not really that tied to the party brand. Maybe they give you more leash. But if you’re in reproductive rights or something like that, or the environment, I think, is a great example of the dynamic that we’re talking about, there are a lot of old-fashioned environmentalists that would love to be able to work with outdoorsman groups and things like that within the Republican Party. But environmental is a Democratic issue. It is a Democratic-aligned set of groups and that’s become more and more difficult for those groups to be able to take positions in a cross-partisan way.
Matt Grossmann: You track these lobbying positions, but you also look at campaign contributions. And you’ve already mentioned that there’s nowhere near as much overlap as we think between the groups involved in those, but we do have some groups involved in both. What are the dynamics of those two tactics or the multiple ways that interest groups have to influence and why would one lead to polarization in the other?
Jesse Crosson: Yeah. We got involved in this area for the book because we come at it from a position of, if I’m a group and I really only care in my heart of hearts about my core issue, what are ways that I can resist these partisan trends and keep from having to engage in mission creep? And one way we came up with is, maybe I can just literally burn money. I can give money to one party or the other, keep them off my back and say, see, I’m on your team, now let me do my own thing when it comes to the stuff I actually care about, which is policymaking. We wanted to see whether this was true.
What we find is that, when you engage in campaign finance activity, at low levels of politicization, so think about issues that are not really to one party or another, if your core issue is not really tied to one party or another, it does appear that, if you give money to one party or the other, you can stay pretty narrow in terms of the position taking on the issue you really care about. However, as your core issue becomes more closely tied with the brand of the party, as it becomes more politicized, as we call it, you actually engage in more partisan behavior both in giving and in position taking.
To be perfectly transparent, we don’t interrogate what exactly the mechanism for why it is you would be expected to do both, but we speculate that we know that diverse signals tend to be stronger, more robust signals of actor type. And so, it could be that, hey, if you’re in one of these really high stakes, close to the brand issue areas, that party leaders expect you to be loyal across more than one domain, more than just position taking, but also in giving.
And it’s worth noting that one operationalization of giving activity that we use here is whether or not you have a pack at all. Because we wanted to be able to examine not just how you gave, but whether you gave at all because of how little overlap there was in these groups. And so, we actually find that the results for whether or not you have a pack are really similar to, if you have a pack, how much money do you give? We thought that was an interesting set of results.
Matt Grossmann: You also look across organizational type, and we’ve been talking about interest groups in general, but it seems like people might be familiar with advocacy groups or citizens groups being polarized and being issue focused, but they might think that institutions, like businesses, associations, and other things that are nonprofits but operate like businesses, might be quite different. And we’re seeing, even with the beginning of the new administration Congress, that institutions are doing their traditional access seeking switches in how they’re signaling. How does that fit into your story?
Jesse Crosson: Yeah. Admittedly, in part because these data are, I think, a little bit more difficult to collect, and the book has less… It does less on this than I think what we would like it to and we’d like to follow up with. What I can tell you is that the results that we show generally hold across whether or not you’re a membership organization or not, whether you’re a corporation or not.
But I would say that the advocacy organizations, when you look even at their earlier ideal points that we generate for them, they tend to fit more neatly into partisan buckets than the institutions do from the get-go. Meaning that diversification is in some ways easier for them than what the institutions are. But it is not necessarily the case that, just because you’re an advocacy organization, that you don’t feel these pressures.
And again, I would turn to the environmental movement as a great example of this. That those are advocacy organizations, they’re membership-driven organizations in many cases. And yet you see a big transformation in the sorts of political activities that they share with each party from, say, the Nixon administration, when he’s creating the EPA, to the Obama and Trump administrations, where you see a much, much more polarized and partisan environmental politics space.
Matt Grossmann: But just briefly, on the business side, does this apply to Google and Facebook, who have big interests before DC, and might need to switch just with the change in administration and control of Congress?
Jesse Crosson: I’m going to be perfectly honest with you here, Matt. I don’t know what to expect with Google and Facebook. I don’t even know what to expect with big business in the Trump era. If we were still in the Obama era, I would say yes, it does apply because, at that time, big business seemingly was still firmly a Republican-aligned interest. These days, the Chamber of Commerce famously endorsed Joe Biden, and then, heck, even on the left, you had the Teamsters flirting with Trump multiple times.
In terms of peak business associations, I think that we’re not really sure where they’re going to end up in equilibrium because you’ve got both parties who are really unsure about free trade, seemingly. You’ve got both parties seemingly being willing to regulate, heavily, businesses they like or don’t like. And then, even within the Republican Party, you’ve got all sorts of confusion as to what exactly the position is going to be on all of these issues.
If you think about TikTok as a great example. What’s going to happen? They passed the law. Is it going to be enforced? I don’t know. Everybody is afraid to say what’s going to happen, what they’re going to do, who’s going to take what action. What I’m confident of is Facebook and Google would love to be able to play both sides if they can and maybe they can so long as it’s unclear as to which coalition that they’re actually a part of. But I am doubtful as to how long they can go in an era of insecure majorities without trying to figure out where their home base is.
Matt Grossmann: After the election, there’s also been a vibrant internal Democratic Party conversation or blame session, where this idea that Democrats have become beholden to the quote unquote “groups,” especially-
Democrats have become beholden to the “groups”, especially in the Biden administration is a big part of that potential blame. But the story is somewhat different than yours, but it may be consistent. It tends to focus on the Build Back Better negotiations and the fact that everybody had to be satisfied with particular provisions of everything going in, and that’s how we got kind of an everything bagel style to policymaking in the Biden administration. So tell me how that fits in with your story.
Jesse Crosson: Yeah. So I mean, one big picture way that this fight, battle, whatever you want to call it, fits in, is that it is, I think, a natural outgrowth of special interests becoming just clearly much less special over time. It’s been really interesting to read policymaking post mortems, angry blog posts about internal party politics and so on. Because you sort of have what I would call traditional or old-fashioned deal makers complaining that why does this specific group care so much about what policy looks like in all these other unrelated areas? It makes policymaking negotiations so much more difficult because you can’t horse trade. You can’t log roll in a way that has been really important for Democratic Party politics as you’ve aptly shown in your work, Matt. But when everybody cares about everything, you can’t trade on differential intensities and things like that like you used to be able to. So just big picture, I think this is an interesting set of difficulties that come out of this transformation of groups from special to caring all about everything.
Where I think it’s different is that what we suspect is happening, and I’ve prefaced this a couple of times, and is admittedly outside the scope of the book because we’re really focused on the transition to where we’re at today, is that it seems to me that people are being socialized into an interest group system where members of interest groups care about everything. And in fact, there’s a whole set of normative arguments as to why each individual interest groups should care about everything. And I’m not here to say whether that’s right or wrong, but people now being socialized into that system are locking it in and making interest groups act like little parties in a way that, well, it makes negotiations really, really difficult. Because again, you can’t trade on these differential intensities and do the normal log rolling thing.
So I would say the big difference between the dynamics you’re describing and the ones we’re describing is we’re really trying to explain how we got there, and I think the dynamics you’re seeing now is how difficult it can be once you are there to be able to do the sort of log rolling necessary in a two-party system to get policymaking done.
Matt Grossmann: Some of the discussion is around trying to explain the same outcome you are. Why did all these advocacy organizations feel the need to take racial equity positions following George Floyd? But they have a different story. Their story is about internal staff demands. It’s about kind of the contemporary Democratic Party.
So I want to know how different you would expect that to be in the Democrats and if there are these other mechanisms that really aren’t that much about external constituencies, but are about the people who are in these organizations.
Jesse Crosson: Yeah. Again, so yeah, that’s exactly right. But the development of those internal staff demands, those staff are coming from somewhere. They’re being socialized in some way into thinking that this goes with this and that goes with that.
What we’re trying to point out is that this stuff happened as far back as the 1990s, not in the 2010s or 2020s, and that what maybe started out as a strategic thing, Democrats saying, hey, we need to all be rowing in one direction as the Democratic Party, Republicans said, we all need to be rowing in the same direction as the Republican Party, but what may have started out as a strategic thing eventually became the water we swim in.
Now I’m fully aware that that is a controversial position and I’ve gone back and forth with a lot of people about that point. But to me, if you look across nationally at how crazy some of our issue pairings are, you pretty quickly see that there’s something specific about what happened in the US and our two-party system that put this issue with this issue and that issue with that issue that don’t necessarily have to go together.
Now, I would argue that this is also true about the right. The right, the whole creation of new fusionism and things like this that made sense of why we should have neocons and libertarians in the same party. Of course, they should go together. Well really? It seems they really disagree about a lot, but I would argue that they work together for political purposes and then eventually it became something where of course those things go together. And once you get socialized into that, you get the sort of staff demands that we’re hearing about within the Democratic Party and the groups that are working within it.
Matt Grossmann: So you also have a section of book that looks at the effects on information, and I know that partisan interest groups might cause people to be less trustful of them as sources of information. But you argue that it’s had an influence even on sources of information like government and universities that were supposed to be the more independent arbiters in the past.
So tell us that story but also fit that in with our kind of contemporary notion that the Republican Party has become especially more resistant of anything being nonpartisan information because they see these institutions as being composed of liberals.
Jesse Crosson: Yeah. So first thing I would say is that Zander’s work with his lab at Northwestern has done a lot more in this space in terms of who’s trusting whom in terms of different information sources. And he’s shown, I think, pretty definitively how different the sources of trust across different information sources are. And so I don’t want to speak too authoritatively on that other than to say everything you just said is definitely true of his work.
What I would say our book has to say about information is that it has to do with coalitions. So putting together a support or opposition coalition to a bill is an important piece of information for a legislator in terms of whether the bill is going to pass, in terms of who is going to be made happy or made angry by the legislation and even whether the legislation is higher low quality just in terms of its substance. This is something, Jeff’s previous work that he’s shown, prospective viability being related to interest diversity.
What we show toward the end of the book is that whenever you have special interest taking positions again and again on stuff outside their core area is that interest diversity or issue diversity becomes less meaningful, because you have groups are routinely taking positions outside their core area of interest. So you can cobble together an interest diverse or an issue diverse looking coalition that basically means nothing. It’s what you might call the usual suspects, all taking positions all together on the same thing. It’s not really signaling anything other than they’re disciplined in terms of message or something like that. So it’s just not as meaningful as it used to be.
Now the flip side of that is if you can get cross partisan coalitions, that they maybe are even more meaningful because it is all the harder, it is all the more costly to put those coalitions today than perhaps what it was in the past. But in terms of the information that legislators can pull just from the support and opposition coalitions that they’re observing, it really is different today than maybe what it was 30 or 40 years ago.
Matt Grossmann: So your broader work focuses on parties and also on legislative capacity in Congress, and it strikes me that you’re kind of encountering the same trends across your research areas, suggesting that interest groups are just sort of more takers of the political system here rather than kind of independent forces guiding it.
It also seems just worthy of comment that all of this kind of stands in a bit of opposition with your Michigan trajectory of seeing interest groups as kind of building the capacity of legislators. So tell me about that. Are interest groups still capacity builders and are they really doing anything independently or are they just kind of reacting to changes that everybody else is?
Jesse Crosson: So yes, I do believe both of those things are true. I think that’s what interest groups want to be. I think they want to be information providers. They want to be subsidizers, to take Rick’s terminology. But they can only subsidize the stuff that people want to be subsidized.
In fact, if you go back to the old hall and Deardorff paper, the title of the paper is Lobbying is Legislative Subsidy. But if you dig into the actual analogy they use, it’s a matching grant. A legislator has to be willing to match effort and match expertise with the interest group in order for that partnership to work and good expert policy to be made. And as you mentioned in passing, some of my work has been on legislative capacity and studying how staff expertise has gone down, staff investment has gone down over time, and I was one time at a conference about this and an anecdote on this point really stuck out to me. It was a longtime lobbyist who was there complaining about how capacity in congress has gone down.
Now, if you had a really cynical view of legislative capacity, you might say, well, a lobbyist should like it if Congress is full of a bunch of novices because then they can pull the wool over their eyes and get whatever they want. This was not at all this lobbyist’s attitude. Instead, what she said was in effect, how am I supposed to partner with a legislator’s office when their lead staffer doesn’t even know what the legislator’s position is on my issue? In other words, how am I supposed to make a matching grant when they have nothing to match? They have no ability to meet me where I’m at and use my information in an intelligent way.
And so what I would say is that interest groups at base would love to be able to push policy forward using the strategic provision of information just like we’ve studied for many decades as adjunct staff and all that sort of thing, all the analogies that have been used in the past. But when committees are de-emphasized in favor of parties, when individual legislator offices are turned into comm shops rather than policy shops and so on and so forth, it’s just harder and harder for them to do the sorts of things that they, I think, at base want to do and like to do. Which is partner in an idiosyncratic way with people that share the concerns that they share.
Matt Grossmann: So we’ve been somewhat of a downer, but you do co-run a program on American institutional renewal, which suggests that you have some faith in our ability to improve conditions. So tell us the optimistic story of learning from this evidence and contend with, I guess, the counter notion that reform groups are going to be subject to all these same pressures. So if you need institutional reforms, what you get is groups that affiliate with the party more likely to get them and have to endorse a whole bunch of things that they don’t necessarily want to and end up just kind of recreating partisan gridlock.
Jesse Crosson: Yeah, it’s a great question and thanks for the shout-out to PAIR, our program on American Institutional renewal here at Purdue. So the first thing I would say is yes, any reform is going to be really hard in this day and age, just like any policy change is really hard in this day and age. So there’s a tough road, there’s no doubt about it. But as silly as this or as strange as this might sound, I’ve been encouraged by how dissatisfied both sides are. Things are so broken and so lousy for policy makers that it’s not a left or a right thing that we’re frustrated with the way that government is working or increasingly is not working.
So I think a lot of the work that we’re trying to do and that we’re hoping others are interested in is finding potential solutions and institutional forms and things like this that are not already coded as left or right-leaning. And you’d be surprised the extent to which I’ve heard some fairly famous right-leaning, in one case a former politician, say nice things about right choice voting, which I would say has gotten coded as a left-leaning thing. But nevertheless as something to maybe introduce into the primary process rather than the general election process. I’ve heard that from a couple of different right-leaning authors.
So I think there is appetite on the right and the left, but it’s figuring out reforms that haven’t been coded as being a pet project of the left or the right. I also believe really strongly in state legislatures as a place to try stuff out where the battle lines are much less clearly drawn. They’re still clearly drawn.
… clearly drawn. They’re still clearly drawn in a way that they haven’t been in the past, but I would say less so than in Washington. And the thing about state government that’s so different from the federal government is you also have state initiatives and all sorts of crazy interesting stuff can get enacted via the initiative process that just can’t at the federal level because we don’t have initiatives. So we think that state legislatures are really important for trying things out and to actually take a leadership role here. One thing I’ll also plug is we’re working on an edited volume right now of a bunch of things that I would call, they’re not all this, but many of them are things that are sort of low salience and could actually happen, but could have a decent impact if they do happen. So this is the other angle, in addition to finding solutions that aren’t coded one way or the other and doing it at lower levels of government.
Also thinking about changes that are not quite so high salience but might actually have a positive effect. One thing that I’m really happy to see is that a cap on how much a congressional staffer can get paid was recently raised. Is that a huge change that a lot of people care about? Probably not, but boy, it goes a long way to be able to retain really good staffers, which previously I’ve shown, and some work is a good way, especially for young new members to be able to get on the right foot in terms of policymaking, things like that, that we’re hoping are things that could gain some traction.
Matt Grossmann: Sorry, to push back one more time, but just on the reform groups, I mean what happened in the Biden administration is that everybody got behind these voting rights proposals, wanted to eliminate that, wanted all the Democrats to vote in favor of eliminating the filibuster to get them all through, even though they knew that that wasn’t going to happen. So they took these high profile votes on it. They compiled legislation that had everything from redistricting commissions to campaign finance reform to voting rights in it. It does seem like the reform community is just becoming another constituency of the Democratic Party subject to the same mechanisms that everybody else is.
Jesse Crosson: So this to me is a huge danger of the reform community. And I’m only a very small voice in this community and I’m fairly new to it, but it is something I really, really worry about that just reform, capital R is getting coded as a democratic issue. I think that’s crazy in part because some of the biggest institutional changes we’ve had in the last 50 years have been led by Republicans, not Democrats. You can say whether you think those were good or not. But the fact remains that Democrats are not the only ones changing institutions and in fact, something as big as primary reform, which I think really gets coded as a left leaning thing for one reason or another.
The top two primary was created by Republican Secretary of State in the state of Washington, in part because he wanted business friendly Republicans to be able to be competitive in a really blue state. And so there’s no reason these things have to be coded as left leaning. But I agree that for one reason or another that there is that real danger and it doesn’t need to be because I don’t think yet, it’s not a politicized issue. So I don’t understand why one would want to show fidelity to one party to the other. This is something that could be appealing, I would say, to both parties.
Matt Grossmann: And I know you’ve studied how we got to where we are now, but we’re all interested in what’s going to happen now. So I did want to ask you to comment on whether you think the Trump era Republican Party changes any of this. On the one hand, Trump certainly seems to be a more transactional politics figure that is less beholden to the party coalition as a constituted of groups and more willing to make whatever deals are available. There’s obviously been changes in Congress associated with that as well. So where do you see this is going particularly with the right in charge for a couple years?
Jesse Crosson: Great question. And predicting is something I would not say I’m great at, although in fairness to me, I don’t know that any of us are that great at it. But so to me the big question for this go round of the Trump era is where do peak business associations, where does business in general find itself relative to the party system? Are they in a position where now they are enabled to sort of play both sides like they want to be able to and act as kingmakers when it comes to the passage of policy? Or is it something where they’re going to be shut out from the right for doing exactly that and help to pave the way toward, I guess more gridlock?
So to me, the thing that I’m most interested in is what happens with these big businesses and especially industries that are still trying to figure out what their partisanship is. I think the tech industry is a huge question when we think about oil companies and things like that. I think they’ve been associated with Republican Party for a long time, Facebook, Google, I don’t know. I mean, they’re still relatively new. Their industries, the regulations are changing every day.
It seems clear to me that their executives aren’t all that clear about where exactly their friends are and where their enemies are. Meta being the most recent example of a policy reversal on fact checking seemingly in response to the change in administration. So that’s where I will be looking to see how and whether policymaking proceeds in the Trump era. I mean the fact of the matter is that, yes, the right is in charge for now, but they’ve got a razor-thin majority in the House and they were barely able to elect a speaker after many, many tries only a few short months ago with similar margins. So it seems to me that they need business-friendly Republicans to go along. They need all the votes they can get to keep their coalition together, but what concessions they and especially Trump is willing to make to keep it together. I’m just not sure and will be interesting to watch play out.
Matt Grossmann: Are polarized interest groups a protection against oligarchy? You guys often put polarized interest groups against pluralism as a potential alternative, but there are lots of people who say that the common interest group form is more that the groups at the top ally against the public. So is that an alternative that polarized interest groups are actually potentially preventing if these groups do have to take a side and not all take the same side?
Jesse Crosson: So that’s a great question. I mean, this is sort the classic Schachtschneider parties versus interest groups, broad conflict versus concentrated conflict. And so maybe it’s just a case that interest groups are proxying as political parties and we do get these broad polarized fights, but we don’t get oligarchy. I suppose that’s one spin you could take on it. The concern I have is that whenever you don’t have interest groups acting as the grease to the wheels in the Madisonian system, that what you get stuck with is your status quo. Now, if you think the status quo is anti-oligarchical, I suppose then yes, it’s really protecting against oligarchy.
I mean, I can’t imagine that many people have that position that the status quo is super friendly to the people, capital P. So I guess I’d channel my inner George Sibelius, we used to debate in class whether gridlock was good or bad for business. And he said, “It’s a stupid question, it’s whether or not your status quo is good or bad for business. And if it’s good for business, then gridlock is great for business. If it’s not, then it’s bad for business.” And so I think that’s sort of where I would turn is that it really depends on whether you like the status quo or not. I don’t know of a lot of people that love the status quo right now.
Matt Grossmann: And is there anything else we didn’t get to that you want to include or anything you want to tout about what you’re working on next?
Jesse Crosson: The only thing that I would say, which this has been very thorough and a lot of fun, thank you again for showing interest in the project and engaging with us on it. It’s been a lot of fun. Let me just make a plug for doing more historical research on interest groups. You know that I love research on interest groups and money and politics. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had is discussing and debating these topics at conferences and talks and that sort of thing. However, it is the case that money in politics and lobbying existed prior to 1995.
The LDA was super, super important in pulling data together for the study of lobbying. But in fact, there was some really important stuff that happened before then. And in fact, interest groups were highly, highly active prior to the LDA. It’s the whole reason the LDA happened. And so I’d like to make a plug for there being more historical studies of interest groups. And I just would say that in collecting the data for this book one source that we got to pretty late in the process that I think is particularly fruitful, our congressional archives. These are just treasure troves of interactions of interest groups between interest groups and legislators, interest groups constantly sending letters and telegraphs and phone calls and things like this, asking for stuff from members of Congress. And with a very short investment of time, we were able to collect several thousand interest group positions just from spending a week at this archive, a week at that archive.
And my plan even after the book, is to continue building out historical data on interest groups from these archives because I think it is important to extract that information and be able to use the sort of over time variation that we use in the study of Congress, we use in the study of executive, other things that we study in American politics and really be able to apply it to the study of interest groups. So just a shout-out to be using these archives more than, I mean, I know you use them, but so many people don’t and they’re just amazing treasure troves of information.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. And I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website, how court nominations polarize interest groups, elites misperceive the public, how bureaucrats make good policy, compromise still works in Congress and with voters, and do congressional committees still make policy. Thanks to Jesse Crosson for joining me. Please check out Taking Sides and then listen in next time.