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The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

John M. de Figueiredo  and
Rui J.P. de Figueiredo Jr.
John M. de Figueiredo*
Affiliation:
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Haas School of Business and Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
Rui J.P. de Figueiredo Jr.*
Affiliation:
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology & Haas School of Business and Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
*
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Room E52-545, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142–1347, USA. E-mail: [email protected];
Haas School of Business, 545 Student Services #1900, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720–1900, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

One of the central concerns about American policy making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions—legislative, administrative, and legal—is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strategies of groups. In this paper we examine in a formal theoretical model how the opportunity to litigate administrative rulemaking in the courts affects the lobbying strategies of competing interest groups at the rulemaking stage. Using a resource-based view of group activity, we develop a number of important insights about each stage that cannot be observed by examining each one in isolation. We demonstrate that lobbying effort responds to the ideology of the court, and the responsiveness of the court to resources. In particular, (1) as courts become more biased toward the status quo, interest group lobbying investments become smaller, and may be eliminated all together, (2) as interest groups become wealthier, they spend more on lobbying, and (3) as the responsiveness of courts to resources decreases, the effect it has on lobbying investments depends on the underlying ideology of the court.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business and Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , August 2002 , pp. 161 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © V.K. Aggarwal 2002 and published under exclusive license to Cambridge University Press 

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