Drawing Lobbyists to Washington: Government Activity and the Demand for Advocacy

Using an agenda-setting approach, we show the interaction between the growth of groups and the growth of government. A pooled time-series analysis of more than 45,000 lobby registration reports from 1996 to 2000 and measures of government activity from the Policy Agendas Project indicates that groups become active in Washington, D.C., in large part because of pre-existing levels of government activity in the issue-areas that concern them. The growth in the range and number of activities of government has created incentives for organizations of all kinds to mobilize, whether they are supporters or opponents of new government programs. We find that levels of government attention in an issue-area explain the level of interest-group lobbying more consistently than does government spending or the number of business firms in that area. We conclude with a discussion of the need for theories of group mobilization to include attention to the demand-creating actions of government itself.