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Reconsidering The Counter-Mobilization Hypothesis: Health Policy Lobbying In The American States

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Abstract

Despite its widespread use since the concept was introduced by David Truman (1951. The Governmental Process. New York: Alfred A. Knopf), counter-mobilization by organized interests has remained theoretically ambiguous and rarely studied empirically. We more fully develop the concept of short-term counter-mobilization, distinguish it from long-term counter-mobilization, specify the conditions under which we might observe short-term counter-mobilization, and test the resulting hypotheses with data on health care lobby registrations in the American states during the late 1990s. We find little evidence of short-term counter-mobilization among health interest organizations, which leads us to more fully consider several null hypotheses about the limits of strategic behavior on the part of organized interests.

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Correspondence to David Lowery.

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An earlier version of this paper was prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 2004. This research was supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research (ID#047727).

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Lowery, D., Gray, V., Wolak, J. et al. Reconsidering The Counter-Mobilization Hypothesis: Health Policy Lobbying In The American States. Polit Behav 27, 99–132 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-005-4055-8

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