How much power do interest groups have? 365How Much Power Do Interest Groups Have?
One 2016 presidential candidate, Democrat Lawrence Lessig, built his entire campaign
around a pledge to convince members of Congress to enact campaign-finance reform.
This, he argued, is the only way to break the influence of special interests over policy
making in Washington. Once reform was enacted, Lessig promised to resign from
office. While Lessig’s campaign went nowhere, his pledge illustrates a widely held
belief about how Washington works: that interest groups have too much power and
something drastic must be done to end their domination over policy making in
Washington. Donald Trump capitalized on this same sentiment with his pledge to
“drain the swamp.”
As we discuss in the What Do the Facts Say? feature, some studies of interest
group influence support Lessig’s claims—but others tell a very different story, one in
which a group’s chances of getting what it wants depend on whether there is organized
opposition to their demand. In other words, as one analysis put it, “the solution to
lobbying is more lobbying.”^57
Scholarly research also reveals four reasons why it is so hard to measure interest
group influence. First, we know that interest groups usually lobby their friends in
government rather than their enemies and moderate their demands in the face of
resistance.^58 As a result, what looks like success may in fact be a signal of something
else. For example, the NR A leadership would probably favor a new federal law that
made it legal to carry a concealed handgun throughout the nation. Why doesn’t the
NR A demand enactment of this legislation? Because there is no sign that Congress
would comply. A more-limited proposal that would force states to honor concealed
carry permits issued by other states passed the House late in 2017 with the strong
support of the NR A,^59 but has not come up for a vote in the Senate. Thus, the NR A’s
decision to not push for national concealed carry legislation and its inability to get the
more-limited bill through the Senate show the limits of the organization’s power.
Second, some complaints about the power of interest groups come from the losing
side in the political process. Consider the “net neutrality” rule that was recently
overturned by the Federal Communications Commission. The rule “prohibitedEVALUATE INTEREST
GROUP INFLUENCEI will Make Our Government
Honest Again—believe me.
But First, I’m going to have to
#DrainTheSwamp in DC.— President Donald TrumpWhile many observers credit lobbying
by the pharmaceutical industry
for policies such as the Medicare
Prescription Drug Benefit (and
its ban on importing medicines),
favorable public opinion, the efforts
of the AARP, and bureaucrats’
independent judgments probably
had greater influence on passing the
Drug Benefit Act.Full_11_APT_64431_ch10_340-373.indd 365 16/11/18 10:26 AM