Abstract
Interest groups spend billions of dollars on campaign contributions to members of Congress in each election cycle. Why do interest groups make campaign contributions to some legislators and not others? I argue that interest groups are strategic in how they disperse their resources. That is, they will give money to those legislators who will help them advance “friendly” legislation most: their ideological allies and members who sit on relevant committees. In order to test these claims, I ran a series of statistical models on contribution data of the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental interest group, in the 115th Congress. The results strongly supported my hypotheses and shed light on the strategies of special interest groups.
How to Cite
Morsell, L., (2019) “Interest Groups and Their Grip on the Legislative Process”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 32(1).
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