The extent to which Interest Groups influence legislative actions and agendas is an important topic, and is widely researched. This paper will review the research of a handful of literary scholars and describe the attitudes and theories of each toward this commonly debated topic. I will address this topic through my understanding of interest groups’ influence, solely based on my reading of the sources I will list further into this paper. While the evidence supporting one’s feelings on this topic may lack empirical strength through direct observations, the relevance of this argument is valid nonetheless.

The direct influence of the approaches these groups take in persuading legislators is numerous and often hard to measure. The two most significant actions these groups take to promote their beliefs and the interests of the people they represent, however, are campaign contributions and lobbying. These two techniques vary in the effects they have on political decision makers. Opinions on whether interest groups influence voting, or simply the agendas brought to the table varies from author to author. Richard Smith (1995) looks at both sides of this debate and explains th

Crisis: The Constitution, Interest Groups, and Political Parties.” After reviewing the article it was found to have to have no significance to the understanding of how interest groups influence legislation.

Logically, the actions of interest groups will not be the deciding factor of the outcomes of every upper-level governmental decision, or any at that. But a clearer view of their importance is necessary and beneficial to the understanding of why certain laws are made.

In Roy C. Macridis’ “Interest Groups in Comparative Analysis,” he forms a comparison between the structure and actions of interest groups in the U.S. and in other countries. Like Almond, Macridis explains a need for a better approach when measuring interest group activity. He states, “by being concerned with sampling the interest group universe, a significant step toward comparability and cumulativeness of theory would be accomplished.”(26) This article was also of minor significance in the development of this essay, due to the fact that it concentrated more on the structure of interest groups in foreign countries, instead of the U.S.

Arthur Denzau and Michael Munger develop a theoretical model of the supply of public policy in the U.S. in “Legislators and Interest Groups: How Unorganized Interests Get Represented.” Based on their model, Denzau and Munger (1986) argue that “interest groups can almost completely control the legislator’s activities (100). This article is also one of the many reviewed by Richard Smith in his essay on interest group influence in Congress. I was able to dismiss this article as a key source, since it is in direct opposition to Smith’s theory, which is the foundation of this essay.

In Ken Kollman’s “Inviting Friends to Lobby: Interest Groups, Ideological Bias, and Congressional Committees,” he discuss who interest groups tend to lobby. The main point of this source is “a lobbyist concerned about a policy issue has no choice but to lobby enemies if everyone on the decisive congressional committee deciding the fate of the policy is a legislative enemy.” (520) Kollman uses one main source for his design, Jack Walker’s 1980 survey of 734 Washington organizations. This source did not

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