The Who and How of Organizations' Lobbying Strategies in Committee

We examine the forces affecting organized interests' decisions to use particular lobbying tactics to target different legislators in committee, using the group-legislator dyad as our unit of analysis. Two basic assumptions underlie our conceptual model of lobbying strategies in committee. First, organizations have legislative goals of expanding the size of their supportive coalitions and shaping the content of legislative proposals, and an ongoing interest in maintaining themselves. Second, different lobbying tactics are better suited to the achievement of each of these goals. Given these assumptions, the tactics organizations use to lobby individual legislators are expected to depend on (1) groups' perceptions of how legislators may help them to achieve their goals; (2) their policy positions and other characteristics of the issue debate; and (3) groups' resources. Our multinomial logit analysis lends suport to our expectations about the forces that shape the lobbying strategies organizations employ.