Inviting Friends to Lobby: Interest Groups, Ideological Bias, and Congressional Committees

Theory: A debate in the American politics literature on lobbying is over whom interest groups tend to lobby, legislative friends, enemies, or so-called undecideds (fence-sitters). I connect that debate to literature on subgovernments and bias in congressional committees in the United States. Hypothesis: Conclusions regarding friendly versus confrontational lobbying of congressional committees are misleading without consideration of biases in committee representation. Methods: Relying on measures of congressional committee members' ideology and interest group ideology and lobbying behavior, I use bivariate correlation and ttests to examine behavioral patterns of interest group and committee interactions. Results: There is a correlation between the ideologies of interest groups lobbying committees and the ideologies of those committees, but this stems more from the general agreement among groups and committees in the same issue areas rather than from deliberate choices by groups. If conservative (liberal) groups lobby conservative (liberal) committees, it is because the set of interest groups active in the issue area tend to be conservative (liberal). Furthermore, committees tend to share the same biases as the interest groups surrounding them. What looks like friendly lobbying of committees is actually bias in representation by interest groups and committees.