The Structure of Opposition inPublic Policy Debate.

“The scope of conflict is an aspect of the scale of political organization and the extent of political competition. The size of the constituencies being mobilized, the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the conflicts people expect to develop have a bearing on all theories about how politics is or should be organized… Nearly all theories about politics have something to do with the question of who can get into the fight and who is to be excluded” (Schattschneider 1960: 20). Schattschneider’s emphasis on the linkage between participation and conflict has deeply influenced recent efforts to understand interest group participation in national policy debates. Scholars have examined the number and type of participants active in policy areas or on different policy issues; they have found evidence both of issue areas and issues characterized by conflict (as measured by high/ “broad” participation), and of issues and issue areas where conflict is presumed to be low (because of low/ “niche” participation) (Brown, 1990; Grey and Lowery, 1996; Heinz, et al., 1993). More recent research has considered how common both niche and broad participation are (Baumgartner and Leech, 2001), and how the structure of conflict varies across policy domains (Salisbury, et al., 1987). What unites each of these studies is the idea that conflict is assessed through focus on the type and diversity of organizations that are active in different policy areas or on different issues. Neglected in this research are additional dimensions of conflict – specifically, type, scope and intensity of opposition – that both provide opportunities for and place constraints upon organized interests in their efforts to articulate and pursue their public policy objectives. The paper I propose for the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association meeting will investigate the type, scope, and intensity of opposition that characterizes the debates on different issues as a function of the characteristics of the issues at stake (e.g., recurring versus non-recurring; small, medium, large scope of proposed change), and their institutional and political contexts (e.g., regulatory versus legislative venue; partisan versus bipartisan). In addition, I will study how opposition varies across the different types of organized interests involved in these debates (e.g., business/economic versus citizen, peak versus externality). Among my hypotheses is that there will be differences in the type and scope, but not the intensity, of opposition associated with issues that are primarily regulatory and those that are primarily legislative. I also anticipate that economic interests are more likely to be associated with issues that involve opposition of narrow scope, and that intensity of opposition encountered on issues of interest to citizen groups will differ from the intensity of opposition encountered on issues that draw primarily the attention of economic interests (e.g., citizen groups are expected to be relatively more likely than business interests to encounter opposition in the form of an insufficiently mobilized set of allies). My empirical investigation draws on data I have gathered (in collaboration with Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Beth Leech, and David Kimball) through hundreds of personal interviews and from various public sources (e.g., Lexis-Nexis, House and Senate websites, organization websites, Vanderbilt Television News Archives) about the advocacy efforts associated with 100 randomly selected issues (see http://lobby.la.psu.edu). In my paper, type of opposition will be measured by the source of opposition (e.g., other groups, members of Congress, the public, the president). Scope of opposition refers to the number and diversity of opposition sources, and intensity will be measured along a continuum to indicate the nature of the source’s opposition ranging from lack of support/interest to explicit hostility. I will use a combination of descriptive statistics, cross-tabular analyses, and difference of means tests to investigate the issue- and advocate-specific correlates of opposition type, scope, and intensity (the unit of analysis is the issue debate, and for some analyses, the issue-advocate dyad). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]