It has often been claimed that “all politics is local.” That twentieth-century phrase is sometimes said, though incorrectly, to have originated with Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, who was known to say that the outcomes of congressional elections were determined by local issues. In other words, politicians running for national office must appeal to local voters and their concerns.
Political scientists and others have since cast doubt on the influence of local voters and their concerns on national policy or trends. There may be less variety in local concerns or opinions across states or cities now than ever, and party platforms across states now resemble each other more than ever.
The nationalization of American politics raises an important question: If political parties and policy debates are becoming more similar across states, are the interest groups seeking to influence state governments becoming more similar, too?
Whether American politics is now more nationalized than ever inspired my colleague, Tyler Collis, and I to conduct a study of whether interest groups are increasingly similar across states. We expected to find that interest groups seeking influence have become more like each other across states, and that partisan polarization would be driving this correlation in the states. If state legislatures increasingly debated the same issues, we reasoned, then more interest groups should find reasons to lobby in multiple states.
But that is not what we found.
In fact, our research suggests that the communities of organized interests lobbying state governments have become more geographically distinctive, not less. That finding has important implications for how we understand American federalism.
Why Would Interest Groups Lobby in Multiple States?
The United States is a federation in which state governments have significant leeway to produce laws and regulations. Despite being able to operate independently for the most part, states learn from each other and often enact similar kinds of policies. One example is graduated drivers’ licenses for teenagers. Florida was the first state to implement a comprehensive, three-stage licensing method, and other states adopted the method after traffic fatalities in Florida were shown to have declined as a result of the new policy. Today, all states and Washington, DC have three-stage licensing methods.
Political scientists call the spread of policies across governments policy diffusion. Sometimes states adopt policies because they observe successful results elsewhere. Sometimes they imitate other states without first evaluating the consequences. Federal mandates and economic competition can also encourage states to adopt similar policies.
Interest groups can help spread policies across state boundaries, even if they’re not a registered lobbying group. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a network of conservative state legislators and business people, has received considerable attention for distributing model legislation. Researchers and critics have linked ALEC to the spread of policies involving voter identification requirements and “stand your ground” laws, among others. The Council might take pride in those findings. Other organizations, such as the liberal State Innovation Exchange, have sought to mimic the success of ALEC.
But what about the reverse relationship? Rather than asking whether interest groups cause states to adopt similar policies, what if increasingly similar state policy agendas encourage interest groups to lobby in more states?
Political scientists have long known that legislators’ own policy agendas affect the mobilization of interests in Congress and state legislatures. For example, when Congress considered tax reform in 1986, and again in 2017, many new interest groups registered to lobby. More groups active in Congress also listed taxes as an issue of interest during those years.
Sometimes, though, it is not clear whether the policy agenda spurred an interest group to lobby, or if lobby efforts affected the policy agenda. The effects of government spending on lobbying likewise involve conflicting processes: Do lobbyists push governments to spend more, or does government spending attract lobbyists? It’s a familiar chicken-and-egg dilemma. For our purposes, however, the more immediate question is straightforward: As state policy agendas become more nationalized, are interest groups increasingly lobbying across state boundaries? We expected to find a positive correlation regardless of whether groups were affecting agendas or vice versa.
Surprisingly little research has addressed this question. One important study by Jennifer Wolak and her colleagues examined the overlap of registered interest groups across all fifty states using data from 1997. They found, among other things, that more populous states tended to have more distinctive interest-group communities, with greater proportions of organizations not found lobbying elsewhere. But the study examined data only from 1997. As a result, it could tell us little about how multistate lobbying has changed over time. Yet every state has required lobbyists to register at least since 1975, so there is more data to explore.
A political scientist examining data from the early 2010s, Alex Garlick, found that more polarized legislatures had more nationalized policy agendas. Tyler and I assumed that the trends Alex found would be present across time, such that polarized legislatures in the 1990s would have nationalized agendas just as polarized legislatures in the 2010s would. What we found, however, was that there is no relationship between partisan polarization and whether interest groups appear in a state, during any decade.
We began with lists of registered lobbyists and their clients from all fifty states in 1997 and 2007, obtained from Jennifer Wolak and David Lowery. We then identified the unique organizations appearing across those lists. This required considerable work. An organization might appear under slightly different names in different states. Walmart, for example, might appear in several state registries, but we counted it as one organization operating in multiple states rather than several separate entities.
Moreover, assuming that one knows fully which interests are truly found in which states, even measuring the uniqueness of state interest groups is challenging. Numbers of unique interest groups active in the states grew over time such that the average number of states targeted by each interest group actually declined. In 1997, there were 21,103 unique entities registered to lobby across the fifty states. By 2007, that number had grown to 33,168. More importantly, the average number of states in which each unique interest appeared declined from 1.63 to 1.52 over that period.
For this essay, I extended our analysis using more recent lobbying registration lists provided by OpenSecrets, formerly the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Our research using data from 1997 and 2007 relied on extensive hand-coding. To apply that work to data from 2017 and 2022, I used ChatGPT to help identify organizations appearing under different names, to trace organizations’ continuity over time, and to distinguish legally separate organizations and foundations. This work must be considered preliminary.
The new results, however, seem to reinforce the broad pattern we originally discovered. In 2017, ChatGPT identified 81,469 unique lobbying entities in the lists of registered lobbyist clients, each appearing in an average of 1.27 states. In 2022, it identified 73,833 entities from the lists, each appearing in an average of 1.35 states. Although multistate lobbying increased somewhat between 2017 and 2022, it remained substantially below the levels observed in 1997 and 2007. The following line chart demonstrates the decline in overall multistate lobbying and the increase in unique entities that lobby over time.
The trends illustrated in the chart suggest that the growth in unique interests in the states over time has contributed to reduced overall rates of multistate lobbying, which is not a sign of nationalized politics. The number of distinct interests lobbying state governments has grown enormously, while the typical organization appears in fewer states than before.
We also examined whether interest groups were more likely to lobby in states with greater partisan polarization. As mentioned, previous research had found that more polarized state legislatures tend to have more nationalized policy agendas. We expected interest groups to respond accordingly, but we found no evidence of the anticipated relationship.
What About Major National Advocacy Organizations?
We also looked for whether major advocacy organizations have expanded their presence across the country. We reasoned that membership-based advocacy groups have members who are motivated by ideological goals, and therefore advocacy groups may be more likely to lobby in states with more polarization. We thus examined ten prominent advocacy organizations to see whether they had expanded their geographic lobbying presence. Tyler and I counted the number of states in which the ten major lobbying groups appeared in 1997, 2007, 2017, and 2022. The resulting figure provides our hand-coded numbers from 1997 to 2022.
In the second figure, the first row of line charts features Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). In general, these five organizations appeared in fewer states than the five listed in the second row: the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Common Cause, National Rifle Association (NRA), and Sierra Club.
Based on the hand-coded numbers, there is no indication that major advocacy groups are targeting more states over time, with the exceptions of the NAACP, some significant expansion by the AARP in the 2000s, and gradual growth over time from the ACLU. Most of the groups saw retrenchment over time, especially MADD and NOW. And, in statistical analyses, we found no evidence that these advocacy groups were more likely to appear in states with more polarization. I note that these numbers are based on lobby registers, so the organizations examined may still maintain an office in more states but not engage in lobbying.
This raises another possibility: Perhaps a relatively small number of particularly prominent organizations are becoming more national in their lobbying activities, while others are retreating. Name recognition might be a symptom. According to a 2011 Harris survey, 85 percent of Americans reported familiarity with AARP and 83 percent with the NRA, compared with 49 percent for the Sierra Club. Better-known organizations may possess the memberships, financial resources, and organizational infrastructure necessary to sustain lobbying operations across numerous states. That possibility deserves further investigation. Our sample of ten organizations cannot establish whether geographic reach drives public familiarity.
I also examined the longer-term continuities in organizations that had already demonstrated an ability to lobby across state boundaries. I asked ChatGPT to identify change over time in the lobby presence of the 2,822 interest groups that lobbied in two or more states in 1997, and that also appeared in 2022. Among those groups, 543 were matched to organizations in 2022. Among those, more than 70 percent decreased their presence such that they lobbied in only one state. This number might even be higher if the unmatched organizations quit lobbying altogether, a possibility I have not yet examined. Only 20 percent of interest groups found in the states in both 1997 and 2022 increased the number of states they appeared in over that time.
What Does This Mean for American Politics?
These findings suggest that the nationalization of American politics is more complicated than it first appears. In general, we cannot say that the nationalization over time seen in party platforms is also found in the communities of organized interests that register to lobby state governments. There are several implications.
First, although voters may increasingly view local elections through a national lens, the communities of interest groups in the states are more distinctive than ever. This is likely because state governments continue to attract more unique interests. Political scientists have known for years that the majority of interests active in the states are institutions like businesses, hospitals, or universities. These institutions are likely to continue lobbying for their own interests. Interest groups, however, simply are not following the same trends as the political parties.
The easiest explanation for this phenomenon may be that political parties in the United States have strong incentives to appeal to large numbers of voters and likewise adopt policy decisions on many issues concurrently, but most interest groups have fewer and narrower positions than parties. Hence, although parties might adopt more platform positions to appeal to increasingly nationally minded voters, interest groups simply do not encounter such incentives.
Second, it remains possible that a core group of interest groups are, in fact, expanding their presence. Recall that the NAACP, AARP, ACLU, and NRA grew their presence across states over time, but that the other advocacy organizations did not. It may be the case simply that some interests have grown over time in presence and influence while others have not. And, for some organizations, lobbying may not be needed. ALEC and the State Innovation Exchange achieve influence by distributing model legislation, so it is not possible to measure their influence in states merely by looking to lobby registration rosters. Their influence remains a topic for further research, but some research is available.
Third, if interest groups are indeed becoming more distinctive across states while voters and parties are becoming more unified in their preferences, then there is a growing disconnect between the groups demanding policies and the voters holding officials accountable. In other words, more voters may wish to see their elected officials take stances on national issues, but local groups may be less concerned with those issues. As a result, elected officials may encounter more competing demands for policy than ever before, and not just from the organized interests.
Fourth, it may be the case that nationalization has encouraged organizations to lobby their state and local officials, and that methods Tyler and I used for measuring interest-group similarity do not capture growing similarity in the actual agendas of the interest groups. With nationalization comes greater attention to the same issues across multiple states at once, but the national government does not make policy in every domain equally often. For example, state and local governments typically administer and fund public schools. If voters across all states begin to talk about the same cultural issues in education, then there is increased reason to mobilize in school board meetings and state legislatures, but not in Congress. This suggests a paradox: The nationalization of political issues may actually produce greater geographic diversity in the organizations lobbying state governments, but not necessarily more diversity in the issues those organizations care about.
A Reason for Optimism About American Federalism
Ultimately, I think our findings provide some encouraging news for American federalism. One of the important advantages of a federal system is its ability to accommodate political, economic, and social diversity across a large country. Different states can respond to different interests, experiment with different policies, and establish different priorities. If the interests active in every state became essentially identical, one important justification for maintaining separate state governments would become less compelling. A system of fifty governments making decisions about substantially similar interests would merely introduce unnecessary duplication and inefficiency. But our work shows that interests do remain distinctive across state borders, and that polarization in state legislatures is not reducing the distinctiveness of state interest groups.
Even as Americans increasingly interpret elections through a national partisan lens, state governments continue to attract collections of organized, state-based interests. These differences suggest that the underlying economic and institutional environments of the states remain important sources of political diversity. Our findings do not demonstrate that national organizations have become less influential, but they do challenge the idea that nationalization is transforming every dimension of American politics in the same way.
