EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR MICHAEL J. MALBIN TRUSTEES F. CHRISTOPHER ARTERTON JEFFREY BELL J. KENNETH BLACKWELL WILLIAM E. BROCK BECKY CAIN New Interest Group Strategies -- ROD CHANDLER DAVID COHEN ANTHONY CORRADO VIC FAZIO A Preview of Post McCain-Feingold Politics? GEORGE GOULD C. BOYDEN GRAY KENNETH A. GROSS Theoretical Structure and RUTH JONES PHIL NOBLE A Preliminary Report On 2000 TREVOR POTTER From the CFI Interest Group Project ACADEMIC ADVISORS JANET BOX-STEFFENSMEIER JAMES CAMPBELL ANTHONY CORRADO DIANA DWYRE JOHN C. GREEN Michael J. Malbin GARY C. JACOBSON ROBIN KOLODNY The Campaign Finance Institute and RAY LA RAJA University at Albany, SUNY THOMAS E. MANN [email protected] MARK J. ROZELL CLYDE WILCOX Clyde Wilcox Georgetown University [email protected] Mark J. Rozell The Catholic University of America [email protected] Richard Skinner The Campaign Finance Institute [email protected] www.CFInst.org 1990 M. Street NW SUITE 380 WASHINGTON, DC 20036 202-969-8890 202-969-5612 FAX AFFILIATED WITH THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY www.CFInst.org [email protected] Contents Introduction 1 Theoretical Frameworks 3 Historical Overview: When Laws Change, So Do Groups’ 4 Strategies Organizational Adaptation to Environmental Change 8 Incentives: The Polarized Political-Legislative Environment 9 Organizational Learning 10 Diffusion of Innovation 12 Interest Group Tactics in 2000 14 Back to the Basics – Mobilizing Voters 15 Labor 16 NAACP 18 NARAL 19 BIPAC 20 US Chamber of Commerce 21 Citizens for a Sound Economy 21 National Rifle Association 22 Taking It to the Airwaves 23 League of Conservation Voters 23 Planned Parenthood 23 Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence 24 (Handgun Control) Business Issue Ads by Newly Created Groups -- Citizens for 25 Better Medicare and Americans for Job Security Internet Campaigns 26 What Have We Found? 28 Innovation and Diffusion of Learning in 2000 28 Partisanship and Strategy – Future Research Questions 29 Conclusions and Implications 30 Bibliography 34 Index of Organizations 39 INTRODUCTION One of the fundamental premises of any system of legal regulation is that laws alter behavior -- either by direct prohibition or by altering the incentives for voluntary action. The assumption behind any campaign finance reform proposal is that changing the law will make a predictable difference. But the assumption is not self-evident. One common counterargument sees no predictable connection between campaign finance laws and their consequences. The so-called “hydraulic theory” says that laws will divert rather than restrain behavior because money, like water, will always find a way. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) is a good test case for these two sets of assumptions. This new statute is the most significant change to federal campaign finance law since 1974. Its prohibition of “soft money” contributions to national parties, and its constraints on broadcast “electioneering,” will surely send interest groups scrambling to The so-called “hydraulic figure out what they should do. Within days of theory” says that laws will its passage, speculation was rampant about divert rather than restrain which groups the new rules would favor. Some behavior because money, thought it would favor groups that could collect like water, will always find and “bundle” “hard money” contributions. a way. Others thought the law would push groups into direct mail, phones banks, voter mobilization, and other activities that would continue to be unregulated and undisclosed. Within two years, we surely will be reading about how the law led many powerful organizations to discover and exploit new “loopholes” of one kind or another. At least some of those stories are bound to be right. Yet, if our information in two years is based only on after-the-fact observations, our conclusions are just as likely as not to be wrong. There are likely to be huge changes in interest group strategies over the next two election cycles. We may assume these will follow paths that are legal under the new law. However, many of the changes might well have taken place even without the new law; indeed, some have already started. If we want to understand the law’s effect more precisely, we need to sort out its effects from those caused by changes in the political and technological realm that would have taken place anyway. And we need to do this knowing is likely that different groups, with different resources and internal constraints, will react differently to the same sets of opportunities and political incentives. To prepare us for looking at the effects of the new law in two years, the Campaign Finance Institute has started a baseline study to help us sort New Interest Group Strategies www.CFInst.org ã2002 The Campaign Finance Institute 2 out the motivations and mechanisms for change in the years just gone by. The roles played by interest groups and political parties in U.S. elections have been sharply transformed over the past decade. The growth before the BCRA in soft money contributions to political parties opened the door to financial participation by donors to whatever extent their checkbooks might allow. Candidate-specific issue advertising – over the airwaves, on the telephone, through the mails, over the Internet and face to face – have further opened the door to unlimited participation by those interest groups whose organizational characteristics let them do more than just give. For many groups, these changes have involved more than just an increased activity level, as they have undergone major shifts in their strategy and tactics, including a willingness to take greater risks to achieve higher-stake goals. For scholars of interest groups, these well-documented developments raise at least four sets of questions. · First, at the individual group level, how can we understand why individual decision makers have decided to change their group’s strategies or tactics? · Second, among the reasons for change, how important have been the incentives, disincentives, constraints and opportunities created by new laws, regulations or legal interpretations? · Third, are some groups better able than others to react to specific incentives and disincentives and, if so, how does this alter the mix and influence of different types of organizations in the political arena? · Finally, what are the system-wide implications of a new mix of activities and organizations, if a new mix indeed is found to exist? This paper grapples primarily with the first of these questions. The larger project of which this paper is part will look at all four, with an eye toward tracing the effects of any new changes that appear as the new law takes effect. Much of the information for this baseline study was derived from two private roundtable dinners held at the Campaign Finance Institute in Washington, DC in 2001 – one with business and conservative groups, and another with labor and liberal organizations – followed by interviews with interest group strategists. The round table participants and interview subjects were chosen largely because of a general impression that these groups were among the more innovative in the 2000 elections. What follows, therefore, does not purport to be representative of all interest group activity. We were trying in this initial phase to probe the reasoning that led people to change. We plan to follow this up with repeated interviews with these and other groups over the next two to three years to trace the evolution in their thinking as conditions change, and as the new law takes effect. New Interest Group Strategies www.CFInst.org ã2002 The Campaign Finance Institute 3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS Political scientists, sociologists, and economists who study interest group activity in elections generally have assumed that groups make standing decisions about whether to be involved, the level of their involvement, their general strategic position, and the specific tactics to employ. Electoral activity has It is obvious that a been viewed as an extension of lobbying efforts; the number of groups have decision to be active in elections and the extent of changed their election that activity was seen as a rational calculation activities, in some cases dramatically. based on the policy agenda of the group and the The changes are not political environment (Hansen, 1991; Gais, 1996). merely random. Groups were thought to adopt a general strategic stance – whether to ally themselves with one party or to support candidates of both, for example, or whether to support incumbents or to attempt to change the composition of government. They were also thought to maintain that stance over time, making relatively marginal adjustments to marginal changes in the political environment. Even the specific tactics of the groups were thought to be relatively stable. It is obvious, however, that a number of groups have changed their election activities over the past few cycles, in some cases dramatically. The changes are not merely random, with the decisions of single groups canceling each other out. The overall contour of group involvement has also changed, with direct contributions constituting a diminishing portion of total activity, while issue advocacy, voter mobilization efforts, and other tactics have become more prominent. These changes suggest a need to rethink our assumptions about individual groups, and to consider the importance of the aggregate changes in strategy and tactics to the political system. The magnitude of the changes by some groups in the 2000 campaign was remarkable. · Planned Parenthood had in 1998 resurrected its PAC and contacted its members by phone and mail on behalf of congressional candidates. In 2000, the organization spent more than $12 million on politically relevant activity through its PAC, 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation and “527” political committee, including $7 million in issue advertising on the presidential race. · The AFL-CIO, which in 1996 had spent about two-thirds of a special $35 million assessment on issue advertising in targeted congressional districts, focused in 2000 on mobilizing its members through person- to-person contact.