ABSTRACT Historically, scholarship in race, ethnicity, and politics has focused on voting and protest. It overlooks lobbying as a mode of racial representation. This article introduces a novel dataset of more than 250,000 California bill analyses (1997–2018) to examine lobbying by racial minority interest groups (RMIGs). The data provide rare insight into when RMIGs are present in policy making. Preliminary findings show that interest groups are more influential when embedded in large, diverse coalitions. RMIGs also are more likely to be part of these coalitions. The results reveal that whereas large and diverse coalitions generally increase the probability that bills pass, RMIGs do not benefit when they are in ad hoc or less-coordinated coalitions. These benefits appear for RMIGs only when they are embedded in more coordinated and durable coalitions. These findings challenge the assumption that lobbying is reserved for elite actors and show that coalition-based lobbying is an important and underexamined mechanism of political representation for marginalized groups.
Nhat-Dang Do (Mon,) studied this question.