Ideology and Extremism of Interest Groups: Evidence from Lobbyist Declarations in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin

Thieme, Sebastian

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2950719

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Second, scholars have leveraged emerging data sources on interest group policy positions to jointly define ideal points for interest groups and politicians at both the national and state levels (Crosson, Furnas, and Lorenz 2020;Thieme 2018Thieme , 2019, or done the same using campaign contributions as a proxy for preferences (Bonica 2014), and recently combined campaign contributions and a network of co-signed Supreme Court briefs to estimate interest groups' ideal points in the judicial domain (Abi-Hassan et al 2023). These ideal points provide important insights into the interplay of interest groups, political parties, and polarization.…”

Section: Conceptual Challenge: Defining Issues and Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

CHORUS: A New Dataset of State Interest Group Policy Positions in the United States

Hall,

Basseches,

Bromley-Trujillo

et al. 2024

State Politics Policy Q.

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Research on the activities and influence of interest groups in state legislatures faces a data problem: we are missing a comprehensive, systematic dataset of interest groups’ policy preferences on state legislation. We address this gap by introducing the Dataset on Policy Choice and Organizational Representation in the United States (CHORUS). This dataset compiles over 13 million policy positions stated by tens of thousands of interest groups and individuals on bills in 17 state legislatures over the past 25 years. We describe the process used to construct CHORUS and present a new network science technique for analyzing policy position data from interest groups: the layered stochastic block model, which groups similar interest groups and bills together, respectively, based on patterns in the policy positions. Through two demonstrative applications, we show the utility of these data, combined with our novel analytical approach, for understanding interest group configurations in different state legislatures and policy areas.

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Section: Conceptual Challenge: Defining Issues and Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

CHORUS: A New Dataset of State Interest Group Policy Positions in the United States

Hall,

Basseches,

Bromley-Trujillo

et al. 2024

State Politics Policy Q.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In a similar vein, Crosson, Furnas, and Lorenz (2020) use interest group positions on post-2004 legislation from Maplight with roll-call votes to locate 2,646 groups in ideological space. A more direct approach is offered by Thieme (2018), who is able to estimate ideology scores for 613 state-level lobbyists in three states due to their declaration of principal lobbying positions required by law. Finally, and also utilizing amicus curiae briefs, Hansford and Depaoli (2015) estimate the ideal points of 192 of the most active organizations at the Court by linking them to justices' ideologies who voted in the same direction as they desired on a case.…”

Section: Ideology Scaling Based On Amicus Curiae Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ideologies of Organized Interests and Amicus Curiae Briefs: Large-Scale, Social Network Imputation of Ideal Points

Abi-Hassan¹,

Christenson²,

Kaufman³

et al. 2023

Polit. Anal.

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Interest group ideology is theoretically and empirically critical in the study of American politics, yet our measurement of this key concept is lacking both in scope and time. By leveraging network science and ideal point estimation, we provide a novel measure of ideology for amicus curiae briefs and organized interests with accompanying uncertainty estimates. Our Amicus Curiae Network scores cover more than 12,000 unique groups and more than 11,000 briefs across 95 years, providing the largest and longest measure of organized interest ideologies to date. Substantively, the scores reveal that: interests before the Court are ideologically polarized, despite variance in their coalition strategies; interests that donate to campaigns are more conservative and balanced than those that do not; and amicus curiae briefs were more common from liberal organizations until the 1980s, with ideological representation virtually balanced since then.

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Ideology and Extremism of Interest Groups: Evidence from Lobbyist Declarations in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin

Cited by 2 publications

References 65 publications

CHORUS: A New Dataset of State Interest Group Policy Positions in the United States

CHORUS: A New Dataset of State Interest Group Policy Positions in the United States

The Ideologies of Organized Interests and Amicus Curiae Briefs: Large-Scale, Social Network Imputation of Ideal Points

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