Abstract
What drives interest group concentration? Presently, the Energy-Stability-Area (ESA) model provides the basis for explaining the proliferation and diversity of interest organizations both within states and the federal government as a whole. However, while past research argues that institutions have an important effect in generating group mobilization, applications of legislative professionalism to the ESA model are unclear at best, showing either conflicting conclusions regarding the nature of its indirect influence or showing no influence at all. Utilizing an original data set, this study reexamines the relationship between legislative professionalism and group density using the ESA model as a framework. The results show that professionalized legislatures, through their ability to accommodate a diverse set of policy positions, encourage group formation and serve as an additional source of energy within the ESA model. This provides support to the notion that highly professionalized state legislatures employ more outside organizations when formulating policy.
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Notes
For a more in-depth description of the ESA model, see Lowery and Gray (1995) and Gray and Lowery (1996a, 1996b).
However, in that particular study, their theoretical interest was in group density and not legislative activity. Because of this, they did not include legislative professionalism in their analysis, though they did mention that its inclusion resulted in insignificant results.
The models also produce consistent results when run with a Poisson model (see online appendix).
For a more thorough discussion of the measurements used here, see Lowery and Gray (1995) and Gray and Lowery (1996a, 1996b).
Collinearity between first- and higher-order terms leads to a higher standard error on the former. Berkman (2001) admits as much that this could be a possible explanation for the lack of significance on the first-order professionalism variable.
For a comparison of this model using Gray and Lowery’s count variable, see online appendix.
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Kattelman, K. Legislative professionalism and group concentration: The ESA model revisited. Int Groups Adv 4, 165–184 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2014.19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2014.19