Vital Statistics on Interest Groups and Lobbying

This latest volume in the CQ Press series on vital statistics in American politics tackles interest groups and lobbying.  This book builds from data that has been collected and organized from disclosure forms now required to be filed by registered lobbyists.  After providing background about the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the book explores such questions as:  When do organizations register to lobby?  What are the characteristics of lobbying organizations (varying from professional and trade associations to businesses, coalitions, public interest groups, and intergovernmental groups)?  How extensively do organizations lobby on issues?  What sorts of efforts do they exert across Congress, the White House, and the various federal agencies?  What is involved in terminations of lobbying firms and organizations?  What sorts of issues and organizations are most often targeted?  And what sorts of moneys are spent and how?  Via narrative supported by extensive tables and charts, Vital Statistics on Interest Groups provides a broad, comprehensive, and informative view of lobbying, interest groups, and campaign contributions and their impact on American national politics.

About the Author :
Holly Brasher received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, and her research focuses on interest groups and lobbying and the U.S. Congress. She has published in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Communication, and American Politics Research. Dr. Brasher has written articles on political parties, public opinion and party leadership in Congress, and campaigns and issues. She is most recently the author of “Understanding the Influence of Lobbying in the U.S. Congress: Preferences, Networks, Money, and Bills,” with Jason Britt in New Directions in Interest Group Politics, edited by Matt Grossmann (Routledge, 2013). She is also the author with David Lowery of Organized Interests and American Democracy (reprinted by Waveland Press, 2011). She was the Principal Investigator of “Using Computer and Information Sciences to Understand Organizational Engagement,” NSF 1127911 from August 2011 to January 2013, an interdisciplinary project that was a collaboration of political scientists and computer science faculty to quantitatively analyze lobbying in Washington, D.C. She is also the author of a blog on lobbying at LobbyingDisclosure.org. Dr. Brasher has served as visiting faculty member at Duke University and George Washington University and tenured faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.