1 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1961; originally published in 1935 as Logik der Forschung); Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961); Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966).Google Scholar

2 Michael Powell was originally a member of the research team, but he dropped out in August 1982 when he moved to Chapel Hill, N. C., to take a teaching position; in some places, I recognize his participation by using the abbreviation HLNS(P).Google Scholar

3 It is the metaphoric representation of HLNS's conclusion regarding their findings on this issue that serves as the book's title: the structure of interest representation is built around a “hollow core”–there are no central players serving a brokerage role among competing interests.Google Scholar

4 Policies of some scholarly journals sometimes presume a process of this type; for example, the American Journal of Political Science requires authors of data-based articles to prepare an abstract “divided into four sections: Theory, Hypotheses, Methods, and Results.”.Google Scholar

5 W. Phillips Shively, The Craft of Political Research 24–25 (3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1990).Google Scholar

6 Emphasis added. Edward O. Laumann & David Knoke, The Organizational State: Social Choice in National Policy Domains xv (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) (“Laumann & Knoke, Organizational State”).Google Scholar

7 An alternative metaphor for the research process might be a board game (one does regularly hear references to the “research game” or the “grant game”). One could conceptualize it as combining elements of Monopoly and Scrabble. It's like Monopoly in the sense of having a mostly unidirectional path but with occasional short cuts or side trips to jail or the Reading Railroad (Is an NSF grant like getting an unexpected inheritance or more like slowly building up property?). Alternatively, it is like Scrabble in that it involves putting things together (words in the case of Scrabble, information or data in the case of research). In a competitive research setting (i. e., where multiple researchers are seeking the same goal), it might be like Sorry or Parchesi. One might also conceptualize it a bit like the child's game of Chutes and Ladders where one progresses toward a goal but regularly encounters bad luck (sliding down a chute and having to work your way back up) or ladders (taking advantage of short cuts along the way).Google Scholar

8 Sometimes the effort to fund a project is in itself safari-like. In one large project I was involved with, I recall clearly the reaction when we heard that we had won the contract: We felt like we had succeeded in shooting the elephant, and the carcass had just been delivered to our front yard; we now had to figure out what we actually would do with it.Google Scholar

9 Natalie Angier, “Flyspeck on a Lobster Lip Turns Biology on Its Ear,”N. Y. Times, 14 Dec. 1995, at 1. The lowest order of classification is the species, followed by the genus, followed by the family, followed by the phylum.Google Scholar

10 One common frustration in training graduate students is the student who reaches the dissertation stage and is at a complete loss over what to do for his or her dissertation research. To be a successful research scholar, one must be driven by intellectual curiosity. Students should be frustrated at the dissertation stage, but by a surplus of ideas rather than a dearth of ideas.Google Scholar

11 One might be tempted to question the role of luck in a craft; however, for most craftspeople, the really successful product is often a matter of luck because of the uncertainties associated with much of the work that a craftsperson does.Google Scholar

12 For useful collections, see John S. Nelson, Allen Megill, & Donald N. McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), and other books in the UW Press series; Herbert W. Simons, ed., Rhetoric in the Human Sciences (Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1989).Google Scholar

13 Donald N. McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics 61–63 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See references to Popper, Nagel, and Hempel cited in note 1.Google Scholar

15 Barney G. Glaser & Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1967); Anselm L. Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jack D. Douglas, Investigative Social Research: Individual and Team Field Research (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1976).Google Scholar

16 Jorge J. E. Gracia, A Theory of Textuality: The Logic and Epistemology 4 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) (“Gracia, Theory of Textuality”).Google Scholar

17 See, e. g., Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977); or Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

18 Some types of demographic characteristic data might be arguably “nontextual” in that they are naturally occurring, but then someone had some intention in defining the categories (e. g., race, gender, age, etc.) which are used in collecting the data. Economic indicators (e. g., money supply, unemployment rate, GNP, price index, etc.) clearly are constructed by an “author” to convey some “meaning” in a given “context,” and the choices made by those who construct the index have important implications in understanding the meanings of that index.Google Scholar

19 In a sense, data serve to establish a frame for the analysis; see Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

20 See Gracia, Theory of Textuality 119–23; I am tempted to refer to this limitation as the quality of “textuality,” but this does not appear to be a standard usage of that term.Google Scholar

21 William H. Honan, “Cardiologist Answers a Raphael Question,”N. Y. Times, 16 Dec. 1995, at 15. The Times article translates “Raphael” as “God heals”; my College Edition of Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language 1205 (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1964), translates it as I have shown, “God hath healed,” which seems to me to fit a bit better.Google Scholar

22 ”The Data Puzzle: The Nature of Interpretation in Quantitative Research,” 40 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 1 (1996).Google Scholar

23 See Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).Google Scholar

24 See, e. g., Robert Gilmore, Alice in Quantumland (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1995).Google Scholar

25 The largest groups of representatives are divided between executive positions in the client organizations (45%) and positions specifically devoted to government affairs (22%); the remaining representatives are internal lawyers or internal research staffers.Google Scholar

26 Also, as a group, those who work as outside representatives, both lawyers and nonlawyers, tend to be middle of the road (p. 157).Google Scholar

27 HLNS briefly examine the stability of issues and issue concerns here as well (pp. 249–52).Google Scholar

28 Interestingly, more of the notables, 45 of 72, were lawyers (18 were selected for each of the four policy domains), a higher proportion than was true of the-representatives as a whole (pp. 264–65).Google Scholar

29 HLNS show and discuss smallest space results for specific cleavages in each of two issues from each domain.Google Scholar

30 They also provide a minimal assessment of the validity of the self-reports by comparing the level of success reported by those representing the “winners” as perceived by the government officials HLNS interviewed in each domain with the level of success reported by the losers. HLNS find that the mean success reported by the winners was significantly higher than the mean success reported by the losers.Google Scholar

31 The other end of the spectrum, where both government and private power is highly concentrated, would be a corporatist system.Google Scholar

32 Just before this reform was introduced and then enacted, one of my colleagues published a book which argued that major reform was extremely unlikely because of the entrenched interests in the then current system; see John F. Witte, The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax 379–86 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).Google Scholar

33 Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982) (“Heinz & Laumann, Chicago Lawyers”).Google Scholar

34 Partners with Power: The Social Transformation of the Large Law Firm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).Google Scholar

35 Beyond Monopoly: Lawyers, State Crises, and Professional Empowerment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar

36 From Patrician to Professional Elite: The Transformation of the New York City Bar Association (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988).Google Scholar

37 The former relies on a small set of clients who are able to demand and get deference to their demands and needs while the latter has a broad client base so that no one client is particular significant in the overall scheme of things.Google Scholar

38 This contrasts sharply with some of the more popular presentations of the Washington insider-lawyer-lobbyist who some authors portray as “insiders,”“fixers,” or “power brokers”; see Joseph Goulden, The Super-Lawyers: The Small and Powerful World of the Great Washington Law Firms (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1972) (“Goulden, Super-Lawyers”); Charles Horsky, The Washington Lawyer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952) (“Horsky, Washington Lawyer”); Mark Green, The Other Government: The Unseen Power of Washington Lawyers (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975) (“Green, Other Government”).Google Scholar

39 All the more senior members of the team had or were doing work on interest groups. Laumann was in midstream of a project on the role of organizations in policy change that would eventually be published as Edward O. Laumann & David Knoke, The Organizational State (cited fully in note 6). Salisbury had built his reputation on the study of interest groups, and Heinz had worked with Salisbury on interest groups during his year of graduate study and published several early pieces on interest group issues. Laumann and Heinz were in many ways the central pivot because they were the ones who had a foot in both research areas (i. e., legal profession and interest groups), Laumann perhaps more than Heinz because of his then current research.Google Scholar

40 Heinz had briefly been a political science graduate student of Salisbury, and Nelson was a student of Heinz's; Powell was a student of Laumann's. Thus, the project brought together three generations of scholars.Google Scholar

41 Progress in developing the design was slow because of the other commitments each of the participants had (e. g., completing books, dissertations, existing research projects, etc.) and because of the vagueness of the initial idea. The initial discussions that began the research the participants came to refer to as the “Washington Study” occurred in May 1980; the design of the basic project was not worked out until early 1982, and the primary data collection did not occur until 1983 and 1984.Google Scholar

42 Parsons's writings on the legal profession had also included a functionalist analysis of interest representation; see Talcott Parsons, “A Sociologist Looks at the Legal Profession,” in Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press, 1954); see also Talcott Parsons, “The Law and Social Control,” pp. 65–78 in William M. Evan, eds., Law and Sociology 65–78 (New York: Free Press, 1962).Google Scholar

43 Salisbury memo (“Further Thoughts Apropos Study of Washington Lawyers”), no date (“early 1981”).Google Scholar

44 Salisbury letter of 16 Dec. 1980.Google Scholar

45 Memo (author unknown) entitled “Proposed Washington Study: Heinz, Laumann, Nelson, Powell Discussions,” 3 Feb. 1981.Google Scholar

46 Nelson memo (“Suggestions about Research Design”) of 5 Jan. 1981.Google Scholar

47 This has many implications, the most immediate of which was the practical problem of defining the population to be sampled: Should it be based on standard directories, either of the bar (e. g., Martindale-Hubbell) or of “Washington representatives” (using annual compilations published by Columbia Books in Washington Representatives)?Google Scholar

48 At this stage HLNS(P) envisioned the larger project as ultimately involving five separate data collection steps: a random mail survey of 1,000 nongovernment lawyers resident or practicing in the D. C. area; a followup survey of those in the initial sample who were engaged in a “distinctively Washington practice” (expected to be about two-thirds of the original sample); a random survey of 500 govermment-employed lawyers in the D. C. area; a “small, random sample of ‘Washington Representatives’ (N = 250)” to determine the relative significance of lawyers in policy representation and to determine in what ways lawyers differ from nonlawyers in their performance of this role; and a survey of lawyers active in each of the issue domains selected for analysis (50 to 70 lawyers in each domain).Google Scholar

49 The proposal was entitled “Washington Lawyers and National Policy Making.”.Google Scholar

50 HLNS(P) were concerned that the ABF board recognize the central role of the legal profession-related aspects of the project; see Powell memo of 3 April 1981.Google Scholar

51 See Robert H. Salisbury, with John P. Heinz, Edward O. Laumann, & Robert L. Nelson, “Soaking and Poking among the Movers and Shakers: Quantitative Enthnography along the K Street Corridor” (presented at 1984 Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association, Washington Hilton, 30 Aug.-2 Sept. 1984. The phrase “soaking and poking” is from the work of Richard F. Fenno, Jr.; see “The Political Scientist as Participant Observer,”in Watching Politicians: Essays on Participant Observation (Berkeley, Cal.: IGS Press, 1990).Google Scholar

52 To a significant degree, the subjects of those interviews reflected preexisting contacts in Washington (from personal relationships or prior research).Google Scholar

53 Otherwise unattributed quotations are taken from my group interview with the authors (13 Feb. 1995).Google Scholar

54 This concern reflected an early hypothesis that stratification would be structured less by law school than was true of the Chicago bar because of the importance of government service, which would tend to wash out earlier factors.Google Scholar

55 Nelson memo, “Suggestions about Research Design,” 5 Jan. 1982; “Salisbury Memorandum re Washington Lawyers Project” (undated, but estimated as Jan. 1982).Google Scholar

56 Heinz, “Notes from Washington Study Conference-Friday Feb. 19, 1982”); Laumann memo (as revised by Heinz), “A Framework for Analyzing the Differing Roles of Washington Representatives in Issue Resolution,” 26 March 1982.Google Scholar

57 They identified (untitled memo of 18 Feb. 1982) the variables the data would need to include: Independent Variables, Channeling Variables, Careers, Social Background and Values, Domain Structuring Variables, Client Organization, Oppositional Context, Government/Agency Organization, Dependent/Intervening Variables, Functions/Activities, Policy Development, Legal-Technical, Substantive-Technical Work, Ultimate Dependent Variables, Policy, Discrete Results for Clients.Google Scholar

58 I should note that this emphasis is much clearer in the project documents from the early 1980s than it is in the authors' recollections.Google Scholar

59 Nelson memo, “Notes of the Washington Representatives Study,” 21 & 22 Oct. 1982.Google Scholar

60 The first publication from the project (written before the authors had done more than look at a few marginals) still emphasized lawyers as the focus of the analysis; Laumann, Edward O. & Heinz, John P. with Nelson, Robert L. & Salisbury, Robert H., “Washington Lawyers and Others: The Structure of Washington Representation,” 37 Stan. L. Rev. 465 (1985). There is no hint in this piece of the small proportion of representatives who had legal training.Google Scholar

61 This issue comes up in the design description submitted in a 1983 proposal to the National Science Foundation for funding to support the analysis of the data: “If necessary, we will draw supplementary samples to achieve a minimum of 60 lawyers in each domain”; recall that the original design called for interviewing 150 lawyers and 60 nonlawyers in each domain. In the end, HLNS did not oversample lawyers.Google Scholar

62 The percentage of lawyers varied sharply by domain, with a high of 55% in labor and a low of 17% in health.Google Scholar

63 Robert H. Salisbury, “Washington Lobbyists: A Collective Portrait,”in Allan J. Cigler & Burdett A. Loomis, eds., Interest Group Politics 152 (2d ed. Washington: CQ Press, 1986). This conclusion about declining influence is not documented in any of the research products; I suspect it reflects comments made by notables lamenting their declining influence. In my interview with HLNS, they referred to such statements: “We got testimony from some of the real movers and shakers that things had changed. The most memorable of them is a guy from [name of firm] who lamented the loss of influence…. Because he was himself one those who had been put out to pasture… put on the art committee and all.”.Google Scholar

64 Nelson, Robert L., Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., & Salisbury, Robert H., “Private Representation in Washington: Surveying the Structure of Influence,” 1987 ABF Res. J. 141.Google Scholar

65 Id. at 158.Google Scholar

66 Id. Google Scholar

67 Nelson, Robert L. & Heinz, John P., with Laumann, Edward O. & Salisbury, Robert H., “Lawyers and the Structure of Influence in Washington,” 22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 237 (1988).Google Scholar

68 Salisbury, Robert H., Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., & Nelson, Robert L., “Who Works with Whom? Interest Group Alliances and Opposition,” 81 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 1217 (1987).Google Scholar

69 Salisbury, Robert H. & Paul, Johnson, with Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., & Nelson, Robert L., “Who You Know versus What You Know: The Uses of Government Experience for Washington Lobbyists,” 33 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 175 (1989).Google Scholar

70 Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., Salisbury, Robert H., & Nelson, Robert L., “Inner Circles or Hollow Cores? Elite Networks in National Policy Systems,” 52 J. Politics 356 (1990).Google Scholar

71 There is also a much higher probability that quantitative analysis involves archived data in a form reasonably ready for analysis.Google Scholar

72 A second realization that came with the construction of the sample of representatives was the relatively small role played by hired guns. Most (about 80%) of the representatives worked not for lobbying firms for hire but for the interest groups themselves. This ran counter to the image of lobbying being dominated by free-standing, fee-for-service professionals who sold their services to variety of interest groups. Salisbury described this as “an even bigger surprise and one very much implicated in the ‘hollow core’ conclusion”; personal correspondence, letter dated 15 Feb. 1996. In some ways, it is surprising that this was so surprising, given that Milbrath had found more or less the same thing (the proportion may have declined somewhat, but it had never been that high) 25 years earlier; see Lester Milbrath, The Washington Lobbyists 145–61 (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1963) (“Milbrath, Washington Lobbyists”).Google Scholar

73 “[E]ven those texts or archaeological documents which seem the clearest and most accommodating will speak only when they are properly questioned.”Bloch, Marc, The Historian's Craft 64 (1953).”Google Scholar

74 See Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact 101–2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; original German published in 1935 as Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache) (“Fleck, Genesis”).Google Scholar

75 See Heinz & Laumann, Chicago Lawyers 290–95 (cited in note 33).Google Scholar

76 They drew this, particularly as applied to Washington lawyers, from the writings of Horsky, Washington Lawyer (cited in note 38), and Parsons sources cited in note 42.Google Scholar

77 The discussion of Horsky and Parsons in The Hollow Core leads the reader to expect that the autonomy/mediational link is a major hypothesis of HLNS's research (pp. 15, 60–62, 184). However, the fact that they found an absence of autonomy in the elite of the Chicago bar leads one to wonder whether the autonomy “hypothesis” was something of a strawperson designed to help structure the analysis rather than being a clearly anticipated result. In fact, the authors told me that they really did not expect to find a lot of autonomy given their experience in the Chicago study. Regardless of what they expected the data to show, the issue of autonomy continued to be a major analytic theme, particularly as it linked to questions concerning power and influence. This is evident in the notes of a meeting they held in 1987 to try to work out detailed plans for the book; “Transcript of Project Meeting at ABF, 1/23/87,” pp. 1–3.Google Scholar

78 Nelson found that 14% of all of the lawyers he interviewed had refused assignments; this figure rose to 22% for partners ”Ideology, Practice, and Professional Autonomy: Social Values and Client Relations in the Large Law Firm,” 37 Stan. L. Rev. 503 (quoted on p. 187 of The Hollow Core).Google Scholar

79 In both correspondence and conversation, Heinz has emphasized that “the hollow core argument is intended to apply to advocacy networks rather than decision-making structures” and that “actors” was meant to refer only to representatives; personal correspondence, 22 Feb. 1995, and telephone conversation, 21 March 1996.Google Scholar

80 In fact, the earlier Laumann and Knoke study (Organizational State cited in note 6)–which focused on organizational entities in two policy domains (health and energy) rather than on individual representatives-included governmental entities and used a different kind of question: “From time to time, organizations face especially sensitive problems in the national energy/health field, where judgments of others are valuable in deciding what positions or actions to take. Organizations often develop relationships with other organizations that they might trust to exchange sensitive and confidential advice about actions or positions that might be taken.” Respondents (speaking for their organization) were asked to indicate with which organizations they had such a candid-confidential relationship (p. 216). The smallest space solutions for the measures of proximity based on this question (pp. 242–47) showed clearly that the cores of the policy networks were occupied largely by government organizations.Google Scholar

81 “Transcript of Project Meeting at ABF, 1/23/87,” p. 3.Google Scholar

82 This problem is closely related to the long-standing dilemma in studying power of the role of agenda setting. A group may succeed in achieving its goals largely by maintaining the status quo which in turn involves keeping issues off the public agenda. See Bachrach, Peter & Baratz, Morton S., “The Two Faces of Power,” 56 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 947 (1962). HLNS do acknowledge this issue (pp. 394, 409–10).Google Scholar

83 Jerome Kirk & Marc L. Miller, Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research 29–30 (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

84 Questions 13b, 13e, and 14b of “Washington Representatives Study, Representatives Interviews,” on file with the author.Google Scholar

85 A not uncommon problem with a draft of a dissertation is the author's desire to show the reader (the dissertation committee) everything the author did rather than selecting out those results necessary to make the author's argument.Google Scholar

86 Compare this to work of photojournalists: most photographs never get past the contact print stage–I once heard that Life magazine photographers shot 1,000 or more pictures for every one that actually appeared in the magazine.Google Scholar

87 Out of curiosity, I took the reported results and tried some reanalyses. In particular, I was curious whether the reporting of a set of uncorrelated underlying factors created any distortions. I tried an analysis that allowed the underlying factors to be correlated, and the results were very messy; often allowing factors to be correlated clarifies results, but this was not true here.Google Scholar

88 In terms of what they reported in the book itself, we know that they employed at least the following methods: cross-tabulation (chs. 3–10, 12), means analysis (chs. 4–8, 10, 11), smallest space analysis (chs. 7, 10, 11), logistic regression (ch. 5), correlational analysis (ch. 7), factor analysis (ch. 4), log-linear path analysis (ch. 5), and multiple regression (chs. 6, 11, 12).Google Scholar

89 This was one of the relatively few situations in which several of the collaborators worked together in a hands-on-the-data fashion.Google Scholar

90 In their telling of this story, HLNS prominently used the weight metaphor by referring to this player as a “heavyweight'! and by titling the first chapter, “The Lawyer and the Heavyweight.”.Google Scholar

91 See, e. g., Gormley, William T., “A Test of the Revolving Door Hypothesis at the FCC,” 23 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 665 (1979).Google Scholar

92 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). While the authors did have some expectation of finding a core elite of mediating representatives or advocates, their use of the power elite imagery in the book may have been more of a rhetorical device than a reflection of intellectual antecedents. Those antecedents were more closely tied to the pluralist perspectives of interest groups (as opposed to interest group advocates) as reflected in the writings of scholars such as Milbrath, Washington Lobbyists (cited in note 72), and Kay Lehman Schlozman & John T. Tiemey, Organized Interests and American Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).Google Scholar

93 See Goulden, Super-Lawyers, and Green, Other Government (cited in note 38).Google Scholar

94 There are other, related metaphors that they discuss, particularly the “iron triangle” of constituent interests, congressional subcommittee, and executive agency (p. 13).Google Scholar

95 See James D. Morrow, Game Theory for Political Scientists (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Douglas G. Baird, Robert H. Gertner, & Randal C. Picker, Game Theory and the Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); or Steven J. Brams, Game Theory and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975).Google Scholar

96 See particularly some of the games described in Michael Laver, Playing Politics (New York: Penguin Books, 1979).Google Scholar

97 However, even in a simple experiment, the problem of generalizing the result beyond the experimental setting may create problems of interpretation that are difficult and complex. And the results of experiments are often not all that clearcut; see Fleck, Genesis 86 (cited in note 74).Google Scholar

98 Perhaps another useful metaphor for understanding the research process is the life cycle, perhaps finding variants of Erik Erikson's eight stages; see Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: Norton, 1980).Google Scholar