TY - JOUR
T1 - Introduction to the special issue on data sources for interest group research
AU - Leech, Beth L.
N1 - Funding Information:
Of course, government and foundation grants to researchers have also been important to the creation of large, shared data sets that may be used for studying interest groups. The Policy Agendas data that form the starting point for the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), for example, were first created with the help of two large grants from the National Science Foundation (and subsequent funds from smaller grants and support from several different universities). In this special issue, E.J. Fagan and Brooke Shannon (Fagan and Shannon 2020) describe how to leverage these data—which are organized at the level of the policy topic—to connect to interest group activity. This is an example of a data source that helps make first steps easy, although there is still the difficult job of making the interest group connection. Information on the number of US associations linked to each policy area can be done using the Comparative Agendas dataset drawn from the Encyclopedia of Associations. But links to other sources of information about interest group behavior—congressional testimony, LDA reports, or interviews and surveys done by the researcher—still require extensive effort beyond the existing datasets. Still, Fagan and Shannon make a convincing case that this is worth doing, both because of the extensive nature of the policy datasets themselves and because use of the CAP coding scheme allows new datasets to connect to so many other datasets.
Funding Information:
Foundations and universities also serve as sources of funding for large collaborative projects. Michael Franz, Erika Fowler, and Travis Ridout, in their article in this issue (Franz et al. 2020), describe three sources of information about interest group-sponsored political ads. One of these, the Wesleyan Media Project (together with its predecessor, the Wisconsin Advertising Project) has been tracking televised political ads in every federal election since 1998. This project has received funding over the years from the Democracy Fund, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Sunlight Foundation, and four universities. Other sources of data about political ads discussed in the article include a governmental source—the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the authors give guidance about the additional coding that is necessary to make the data useable by researchers. Finally, the authors give detailed guidance about making use of social media platforms’ records of political advertising, focusing on data provided by Facebook.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - Technological advances, increasing amounts of online governmental records, and transparency efforts by nonprofit organizations have led to a new abundance of data sources for studying the political activities of interest groups. In this special issue, fourteen sets of authors review these data sources and offer advice on how best to make use of them. The data sources discussed include reports filed as required by the Administrative Procedures Act, the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the Lobbying Disclosure Act, as well as data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, the Comparative Agendas Project, the Comparative Interest Groups survey project, INTERARENA, INTEREURO, MapLight, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the Political Group Communication Database, and the Wesleyan Media Project.
AB - Technological advances, increasing amounts of online governmental records, and transparency efforts by nonprofit organizations have led to a new abundance of data sources for studying the political activities of interest groups. In this special issue, fourteen sets of authors review these data sources and offer advice on how best to make use of them. The data sources discussed include reports filed as required by the Administrative Procedures Act, the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the Lobbying Disclosure Act, as well as data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, the Comparative Agendas Project, the Comparative Interest Groups survey project, INTERARENA, INTEREURO, MapLight, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the Political Group Communication Database, and the Wesleyan Media Project.
KW - Interest groups
KW - Lobbying
KW - Organized interests
KW - Political data sources
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85090112586&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1057/s41309-020-00103-y
DO - 10.1057/s41309-020-00103-y
M3 - Editorial
AN - SCOPUS:85090112586
SN - 2047-7414
VL - 9
SP - 249
EP - 256
JO - Interest Groups and Advocacy
JF - Interest Groups and Advocacy
IS - 3
ER -