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When the French aristocrat Alex de Tocqueville toured the new American nation in the 1830s, he was amazed by the tendency of Americans to organize interest groups to advocate social change. Compared to the politics of "Old Europe," Americans preferred to use political organizations to pursue their social objectives. Modern comparative political science supports that conclusion. Among the peoples of developed nations, Americans belong to more interests groups than any other people and expect these groups to promote their interests and preferences for them. Those in the other developed nations tend to leave such tasks to political parties (Hrebenar 1997).

The Encyclopedia of Associations lists over 20,000 interest groups operating in the United States in the early 21st century (Hunt 2004). The primary focus point for interest groups and lobbying is the U.S. national capital, Washington, DC. In the past several decades, many interest groups moved their national headquarters to K Street so that they can be close to the action on Capitol Hill. Over 20,000 lobbyists are registered in Washington, DC, and that figure represents only a part of the total of lobbyists representing all types of interests and issue areas.

As more and more state governments have expanded their budgets and activities in recent decades, the state-level interest group systems have become more professional and powerful. Interest group politics in Sacramento, California, Albany, New York, and Springfield, Illinois, have come to resemble that found in Washington, DC.

Who are these lobbyists? Many of them are lawyer-lobbyists. In the latter half of the last century, Washington law firms discovered a new revenue stream can be generated by adding a lobbying corps to the basic law firm. Lawyers have many of the skills that make for effective lobbyists. They are trained to understand the law and how it is made, interpreted, and implemented. They are also trained to be effective negotiators--and negotiation is a crucial activity for lobbyists trying to persuade others to support the political objectives of their clients. Many lobbyists are former bureaucrats who have served for a number of years in the governmental bureaucracy--often as staff members for the Congress and its specialized committees or as staff members for the various departments or agencies of government. Holding such jobs gives these lobbyists both subject expertise and lots of personal contacts with government decision makers. Former members of Congress are also valued as future lobbyists given their experience in various issue areas, political knowledge, and contacts in government. Finally, some lobbyists emerge from within the ranks of interest groups' employees and work their way up the ranks to jobs in political affairs, governmental relations, or as executive directors--top lobbyists for many interest groups in Washington (Hrebenar and Thomas 2004).

What do lobbyists do? Primarily, lobbyists provide information to governmental decision makers. They act as representatives of the various interests to the representatives in government. The types of information they provide vary depending on the background of the lobbyist, the policy situation, the political environment, and the governmental decision maker they are lobbying. Some lobbyists are the nation's foremost experts in a particular and very specialized field, such as the extraction of oil from shale (a rock). Others can advise on the nature of public opinion regarding a particular bill, and still others can help plan strategy for getting a bill passed in Congress or a regulation approved in the federal bureaucracy. Since lobbyists represent so many different groups involved in a particular policy debate, a huge amount of useful information is available to the decision makers. Some lobbyists act as watchdogs for their interests--monitoring the key sites of government and reporting back to their interests if anything is happening in a department, agency, or house of Congress that may impact upon the interest. Others are pure advocates or contact lobbyists--often assigned to the White House, the Congress, or a particular department of the bureaucracy and having a variety of contacts in these sites they can use to try to effect a particular outcome. Some lobbyists are specialists in putting together coalitions for a particular bill and thus maximizing the power behind their cause by dividing up the work needed to achieve victory.

One of the major changes that has characterized lobbying in recent years has been the growing sophistication of the tools of the trade (Cigler and Loomis 2006). In decades past, lobbying was exclusively a face-to-face communications activity. Now, however, much of the communications is increasingly electronic, with e-mail messages replacing the old standard of sending a letter or a telegram to your congressperson. In the 1960s and 1970s, such communications were usually by fax or telephone; now, the Internet is used to alert the group's membership to ask them to help lobby the decision makers. This type of lobbying, the activation of members to get out the message, is called grassroots lobbying. There are several types of grassroots lobbying: "shotgun grassroots," where the activation of many members of an organization or coalition is the goal and thus, maybe millions of members may communicate their support; and "rifling grassroots," where the activation of some elite members of the organization produces a more personal and more effective type of communications. When grassroots lobbying is perceived to be ineffective because it seems too artificial or characterized by many very similar, if not identical, messages, it is called "Astroturf "--after the plastic grass of the Astrodome in Houston.

Another electronic form of contemporary lobbying is found in the various outlets of mass media. While billboards and lawn and telephone signs used to be an effective form of issue communication in the 1950s and 1960s, now television, especially cable television, offers interest groups the ability to target very specific groups of people. An interest group can run television ads in just the congressional districts represented by all the wavering members of a specific congressional committee considering a bill of great import to the group. This is what the Health Insurance Association of America did in 1993 with its now famous "Harry and Louise" ads, as the Clinton administration tried to pass a health care reform bill. The ads cast doubt on many parts of the proposed law, which finally died in Congress without an up-or-down vote. Recent decisions by the Supreme Court, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), have made such advocacy TV ads a much more readily available tool for interest groups to use in electoral campaigns in support of politicians who favor their cause or against those who oppose it.

Many interests, especially those seeking to challenge the existing social, political, or economic orders in the United States, do not have the resources to engage in multi-million-dollar TV advertising campaigns. These interests have some types of resources that can allow them to participate in the political process--even if they are at a serious disadvantage in terms of money and other resources that their more established opponents have in abundance. These interests are usually called social movements because they lack the organization, formal membership, and resources of more traditional interest groups. This is not to say that they are not important parts of the political system. In some cases, they represent millions of people who support to one degree or another a particular policy outcome such as equality of treatment for gays and lesbians or express the anger and frustration voiced by the Tea Party supporters in 2010's elections. These interests usually try to gain greater public support for their cause by creating free media events that allow them to gain free media coverage for their cause. Thus, the tools of choice are marches, demonstrations, boycotts, and various actions that draw people--and especially the media--to cover them and their cause. Many of the great interest groups of the contemporary United States began as disorganized social movements and after some success evolved into the more conventional form of interest groups employing the conventional strategies and tactics of such groups. Some of the groups that emerged out of these broader movements include the National Organization of Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Friends of the Earth.

Bibliography:

Berry, Jeffrey, and Clyde Wilcox, Interest Group Society. New York: Longman, 2008.

Burbank, Matthew J., Ronald J. Hrebenar, and Robert C. Benedict, Parties, Interest Groups, and Political Campaigns. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008.

Center for Responsive Politics, Lobbying Database. 2011. www.opensecrets.org/lobby/

Cigler, Allan, and Burdett A. Loomis, Interest Group Politics. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2006.

Costain, Anne E., and Andrew S. McFarland, Social Movements and American Political Institutions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.

Hrebenar, Ronald, Interest Group Politics in America. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.

Hrebenar, Ronald, and Bryson B. Morgan, Lobbying in America: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009.

Hrebenar, Ronald J., and Clive S. Thomas, "Interest Groups in the States." In Politics in the American States, ed. Virginia Gray and Russell L. Hanson. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2004.

Hunt, Kimberly N., Encyclopedia of Associations. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale-Thomson, 2004.

Kaiser, Robert G., So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

Meyer, David S., The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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