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Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion and Interest Group Strategies. By Ken Kollman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 215p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Gary McKissick, Emory University
In an age when commercials bombard us with plain folk (from central casting) ruminating about the latest proposal in Congress and when "astroturf" more often refers to synthetically manufactured grassroots activity than to stadium playing fields, evidence that groups frequently "go public" is easy to come by. Nevertheless, these efforts to reach and use the public have received little systematic attention from political scientists. Ken Kollman aims to fill this substantial gap in interest group scholarship. Outside Lobbying is an impressive effort, one that should invigorate further inquiry into this important aspect of interest group advocacy.
Kollman builds off a crucial distinction he draws between a policy issue's popularity and its salience. What people think about some issue is likely to be relatively clear to policymakers, Kollman argues, but how much they care about it at any given time typically will be more uncertain and variable (p. 9). Because salience, as a cousin to intensity, helps policymakers gauge the likelihood of eventual (electoral) political action, groups' information about a policy's salience is of value to policymakers.
From this basic insight, Kollman articulates a model of outside lobbying, which signals policymakers about the salience of some issue to their constituents. Although grounded in a formal signaling game (the technical details of which are confined to Appendix D in the book), Kollman's analysis requires no great familiarity with formal models. The accessibility of this book, in fact, is one of its strengths.
Underlying Kollman's account is a fundamental duality that the author does his best to address. In the formal logic of his signaling model, salience must be treated as exogenous to any interest group's lobbying activity. But clearly, as Kollman acknowledges, that is an unrealistic assumption; the lobbying may very well influence salience, at least among some relevant public. Indeed, that may often be the point. He thus distinguishes between the "signaling" role...