The Organization Ecology of Interest Communities

Assessment and Agenda

Darren Halpin, David Lowery, Virginia Gray, Darren Halpin, David Lowery, Virginia Gray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137514318
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This volume summarizes the origins and development of the organization ecology approach to the study of interest representation and lobbying, and outlines an agenda for future research. Multiple authors from different countries and from different perspectives contribute their analysis of this research program.

1

An Introduction to the Population Ecology Approach

David Lowery and Virginia Gray

For a very long time, the essential traits of populations of organized interests – their density and diversity – were not considered to be especially interesting. Rather, they were assumed to be simple tallies resulting from mobilization events whereby institutions became active in lobbying or they, along with individual citizens, joined groups or associations that lobbied (Truman 1951; Olson 1965). This changed with the publication of Gray and Lowery’s The Population Ecology of Interest Representation in 1996 (also see: Lowery and Gray 1995). Inspired by core theories of population biology and organization ecology, they outlined a theory that both accounted for observed variations in the density and diversity of interest communities in the American states and suggested ways in which these emergent population characteristics shape organization survival and adaptation, the strategies and tactics interest organizations employ, and how influential these can be in political contexts. Since 1996, the organization ecology research program has engendered work on all of these topics and has been applied to a wide range of political systems, including the European Union, its member states, and international organizations. In short, we now know that the structure of interest communities matters a great deal.

Given this growing body of research, it is time to reconsider the contributions and further prospects of the research program. These are the purposes of the chapters in this volume. The chapters were commissioned from active research scholars for several distinct purposes. In some cases, we wished to canvas the rapidly growing literature to see how the theoretical insights from the original theory have fared when applied to new cases. We also wished to highlight how the theory has changed and been elaborated on since it was originally introduced in the mid-1990s. Another purpose was to draw attention to significant gaps in empirical research that merit further examination. We also sought to explore the broader literature on the politics of interest representation not based explicitly on an organization ecology perspective to see what it might tell us about the issues of concern to organization ecology. And finally, we wanted to give voice to broader assessments of the research program – the perspectives of students of interest representation not working explicitly from our theoretical platform, of students of organizational ecology more generally, and, perhaps most importantly of all, of critics of our approach to understanding the politics of interest representation. In short, we wanted to know where the state of research is now and where it should be going in the future.

The individual chapters on these topics are organized along the scheme of the influence production process (Lowery and Gray 2004) running from the core of the research program on the density and diversity of interest communities and niche theory to the influence these have on lobbying strategies and tactics and their influence on the policy process. The last three substantive chapters provide the kinds of general assessments noted above – from a general interest group scholar, a general organization ecology perspective, and a strong critic of the research program. The last chapter in the volume provides a response to all of the forgoing from the three editors by way of suggesting how the research program should develop in the future. The remainder of this introductory chapter outlines the topics addressed by the research program and introduces the individual chapters in the volume and their authors.

The core: Interest organization demography

Contemporary analysis of interest organization populations is now typically approached from a population/organizational ecology perspective, and the core of this perspective is its analysis of interest system density and diversity. The theory, however, is not new. Population ecology theory originated in biology as scholars sought to understand the density and diversity of species (MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Real and Brown 1991). Sociologists (Hannan and Freeman 1989; Hannan and Carroll 1992; Carroll and Hannan 2000) later adopted it as a useful approach for understanding the density of organizations of all kinds. Drawing from both sources, political scientists then applied the theory more specifically to understanding the density and diversity of interest organization populations (Gray and Lowery 1996a; Halpin and Jordan 2012a).

This approach offers two central insights: that the densities of populations are determined by more than the micro-level processes that govern the lives of individual interest organizations, such as Olson’s (1965) collective action hypothesis, and that it is the environment that is most telling in determining population density. This means that we must look at the environmental resources supporting organized interests in order to understand interest system density and diversity. One key element of that environment is the number of similar organizations that are competing for scarce resources (Halpin and Jordan 2012b).1 Thus, if resources are relatively fixed over the period in which one is examining demographic change, then it is population density itself that becomes the limiting factor on the numbers of births and/or deaths of interest organizations. This density analysis was then extended to develop a new organization ecology model of interest system diversity based on systematic variations in the density functions of different kinds of interest guilds (Lowery et al. 2005). In short, diversity is a function of economies of scale of industrial production that are reproduced in economies of scale of lobbying, not wealth or some of the other variables typically cited in older studies of interest community diversity (Schattschneider 1960).2

Empirically, this theory’s density hypothesis is tested with two quite different methods. The first employs time series to assess population ecology hypotheses (Lack 1954; Hannan and Freeman 1989; Hannan and Carroll 1992). For example, Nownes (2004), Nownes and Lipinski (2005), and Fisker (2013) have studied the temporal development of populations of specific types of interest organizations using the kinds of models employed in general organization ecology research. Others have applied the same modeling strategy to larger aggregations, such as all associations (Aldrich et al. 1994; Jordan et al. 2012). Assuming that resources are fairly constant over time, these studies focus on a succession of periods of very slow growth (legitimation), very rapid growth (positive density dependence), and then little or no growth (negative density dependence) in a population that defines an S-shaped curve. Thus, while the second method examines population responses to resources directly, the first typically assumes fixed resources and then models the population against itself over time.3 The research relying on a time series approach, with special attention to the US case, is reviewed and discussed by Anthony Nownes in chapter 2.

Others examine organization ecology hypotheses via cross-sectional analysis of interest systems. In the tradition of island biogeography (Lack 1947; MacArthur and Wilson 1967), Gray and Lowery’s The Population Ecology of Interest Representation (1996a) treated the American states as islands and employed a cross-sectional Energy, Stability, Area (ESA) model. The model highlights how the environmental forces of policy uncertainty (energy or demand) and competition for scarce resource with similar organizations within an environment (area or supply) influence population density. Thus, this approach to organization ecology models directly the resources interest organizations need to survive. Others applied the same method to understand interest community density within single systems by treating subsets or guilds of interest organizations as islands or the units of analysis (Messer et al. 2011; Berkhout et al. 2015). Joost Berkhout, in chapter 3, summarizes research using this cross-sectional approach to the study of interest system density with special attention to European cases, and the relationship between organization ecology theory and earlier approaches to understanding interest communities.

Both of these approaches rely on what Jan Beyers and Marcel Hanegraaff refer to in chapter 4 as a bottom-up method of enumerating a population – identifying all of the organizations in an interest community. They compare this approach to one starting with issues and identifying organizations lobbying on these issues, an approach they identify as a top-down method. In discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches, they also review the burgeoning literature on transnational lobbying, another unique domain of research in which organization ecology has proved of some use.

Micro-level processes: Niche theory, adaptation, and survival

The structural elements of interest systems – their density and diversity – are emergent properties. That is, density and diversity are community-level properties that arise from more micro-level events bearing on individual interest organizations that are initially mobilized (or not), engage in political activity (or not), and survive (or not). At the same time, a key assumption of the organization ecology approach is that the emergent properties of density and diversity feedback to this micro-level and influence rates of mobilization, political engagement, and survival. This notion was expressed for biological populations in ecologist Paul Colinvaux’s (1978: 12) observation that “the way in which an animal breeds has very little to do with how many of it there are. This is a very strange idea to someone new to it, and needs to be thought about carefully. The reproductive effort makes no difference to the eventual size of the population. . . . The numbers that may live are set by the environment and these are quite independent of how fast a species makes babies.” In our terms, this means that we are unlikely to understand interest community density and diversity by simply assuming an intrinsic rate of mobilization and then perpetual survival, as Olson (1982: 40) asserted. Rather, both attributes are variables meriting our attention. Mobilization rates vary with the density of interest systems (Lowery et al. 2004, 2008), and most interest organizations do not survive for very long (Gray and Lowery 1995b; Lowery and Gray 2001; Anderson et al. 2004; Berkhout and Lowery 2011).

This means, however, that much of the “action” of the organization ecology of interest representation must take place at the micro-level. The population/organization ecology lever used to understand this “action” is niche theory (Gray and Lowery 1996b, 1997).4 Based on biologist Evelyn Hutchinson’s (1957) conception of a niche “as an attribute of the population (species) in relation to its environment,” the theory highlights...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 An Introduction to the Population Ecology Approach
• 2 Organizational Demography Research in the United States
• 3 Interest Organization Demography Research in Europe
• 4 Toward a Population Ecology Approach to Transnational Advocacy? An Emerging Research Field
• 5 Challenges of Integrating Levels of Analysis in Interest Group Research
• 6 Organizational Populations: Professionalization, Maintenance and Democratic Delivery
• 7 Case Study Approaches to Studying Organization Survival and Adaptation
• 8 Lobbying as a Leveraged Act: On Resource Dependencies and Lobby Presence
• 9 Louder Chorus – Same Accent: The Representation of Interests in Pressure Politics, 1981–2011
• 10 Interest Community Influence: A Neopluralist Perspective
• 11 Population Dynamics and Representation
• 12 The Influence of Organization Ecology Research on Population Ecology of Interest Representation: Present Practices and Future Prospects
• 13 Beyond Metaphor: Populations and Groups, Interests, and Lobbyists
• 14 The Future of Organization Ecology in Interest Representation
• Index