In a departure from previous research, we focus on the dyadic relationship between lobbyists and committee members in the House of Representatives in order to test hypotheses about what factors shape the decisions of individual groups to lobby individual committee members. Our primary assumption is that organized interests seek to expand their supportive coalitions and affect the content and fate of bills referred to committees. In order to accomplish these goals, they give highest priority to lobbying their legislative allies in committee; allies may lobby other members of Congress on a group's behalf and shape legislation to conform with a group's preferences. But organizations with access to a strong resource base can move beyond their allies and work directly to expand support among undecided committee members and legislative opponents. Our empirical analysis provides evidence to support our expectations.

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In Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science (1998), Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech characterized a series of problems in the interest group research published between 1950 and 1995. In this article, we assess whether recent research has become more theoretically coherent, more attentive to context, and broader in both scope and topical focus, all of which are crucial to advancing the systematic study of interest groups and their policy-making activities. Overall, we observe more largescale and longitudinal studies between 1996 and 2011 than Baumgartner & Leech observed between 1950 and 1995. This newer literature also is much more likely to focus on key issues for students of politics, and to give attention to the context in which organizations operate to affect public policy. However, we see minimal evidence that scholars addressing similar questions within the subfield are operating from one or a few shared theoretical frameworks. 9.1 Review in Advance first posted online on March 22, 2012. (Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print.) Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print

Americans' feelings about the performance of Congress range across the spectrum from positive to negative, but tend to be negative. What accounts for supportive or unsupportive orientations toward Congress? The effects of personal attributes like socioeconomic status, or beliefs about the efficacy of congressional processes, account for only part of citizens' evaluations of Congress. We argue that discrepancies between what people expect Congress to be like and what they perceive it actually is like independently affect evaluations of Congress. We measure this "expectation-perception discrepancy" and demonstrate in a multivariate explanatory environment that this discrepancy affects the extent of Americans' favorableness toward Congress, drawing upon data gathered in a 1994 postelection survey (N = 808) conducted in Ohio by the Polimetrics Laboratory for Social and Political Research at Ohio State University. Our argument is elementary. Citizens carry with them expectations, however rudimentary, about political institutions, Congress in particular, and about processes taking place within Congress. Such expectations may develop in the form of fuzzy images of the institution as a whole, arise from very partisan or ideological perspectives, biases, and distortions, focus on particular institutional actions or events, or concern the characteristics or attributes of the institution's members. Citizens' expectations about Congress may develop from specific socialization, perhaps in early life experience, about what Congress should be like. Civics textbook expectations about Congress's constitutional function, its members and their conduct, its representativeness, its accessibility, or its reliability in passing legislation may shape citizens' expectations, forming an image or "prototype" of the congressional ideal. Citizens' perceptions of the congressional reality-what they think Congress

The 2000 presidential election focused attention on the problem of unrecorded votes, in which a person casts a ballot but fails to record a valid vote for a particular contest. Although much recent research has evaluated voting technologies and their effects on unrecorded votes, there has been little research on the effects of ballot design. We argue that the same theories used to design and evaluate self-administered surveys can be used to analyze ballot features. We collect and code paper-based ballots used in the 2002 general election from 250 counties in 5 states. We code the ballots in terms of several graphic design elements, including the content and location of ballot instructions and the layout of candidate names and office titles. Our analysis suggests that several ballot features are associated with unrecorded votes (both overvotes and undervotes) in the gubernatorial contests. We also find that ballot design features exacerbate the racial disparity in unrecorded votes. Ballot design can be an important factor in determining whether voters are able to cast a ballot accurately, which can influence the legitimacy of elections. The 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount controversy illuminated the phenomenon of unrecorded votes (in which some voters come to polling places but fail to cast a valid vote for a particular contest). Roughly 2 million voters (almost 1 out of every 50 to cast a ballot) failed to cast a valid vote for president in the 2000 election (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). The Florida imbroglio prompted a new wave of research on election administration and a flurry of election reform laws in Congress and