Interest Group Competition and Cooperation at Legislative Hearings

Legislative committee hearings have attracted little attention from scholars, yet Schlozman and Tierney (1986) found that testifying is the advocacy tactic most frequently used by interest group lobbyists. I argue that opportunities to testify are valuable enough to lobbyists that they may be willing to put aside competitive differences with rival groups to jointly support committee agendas. I test this argument using data on lobbyist testimony before 20 committees on six issues from 1999 to 2002. The results suggest that whether legislators actually desire competing lobbyists to present a united front behind the committee may depend on the committee's own ideological relationship with the parent chamber. I also find that the attractiveness of the incentive to testify is less enticing to lobbyists when it requires them to compromise their organization's position on issues of importance to their members, or when competition between interest groups is especially great.