AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: In this book, we document how, and seek to explain why, so-called special interests have come to behave more like political partisans than narrow, policy-motivated entities. Leveraging a new dataset of approximately 200,000 instances of interest group position-taking on congressional legislation, 1973–2020, we show how groups have evolved such that they are well-characterized by a single preference dimension and have sorted into left- and right-leaning teams. Given the long-standing conceptualization of interest groups as parochial and policy-driven and given the unpredictable nature of political control in modern American institutions, these developments are puzzling and raise fundamental questions about the role that private interests play in American politics. We argue that, as partisan competition over the levers of government intensified, interest groups faced heightened incentives toward partisan political teamsmanship. We argue that interest groups have responded to this environment by signaling their alignment with a single party, in an effort to secure access to electorally minded party leaders. To do so, groups have broadened their policy interests beyond their core issue areas, leading them to the quasi-partisan sorting observed today. We test this account of group/party relations by analyzing our position-taking data, using a series of preference measurement and text-analytic methods to explore the conditions under which groups have chosen to act as partisans.
Dr. Jesse Crosson (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2019) is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Program on American Institutional Renewal (PAIR) at Purdue University. He conducts research on the influence of hyperpartisanship on American political institutions, with a special focus on legislative politics, interest groups, policy expertise, and institutional reform. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity University, as well as Fellow and Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. Currently, Crosson is a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Effective Lawmaking, an advisory board member at the Levin Center’s State Oversight Academy, and a research contributor to Unite America and New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group. His research has appeared the American Political Science Review, Political Science Research and Methods, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and Legislative Studies Quarterly, among other venues.
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