Governing the States and the Nation: The Intergovernmental Policy ...

will be more standard and systematic in their application. Indeed, a substantial number of quantitative studies have been conducted. However, the results of these studies have not been consistent. In some cases, it appears as though interest groups have tremendous influence upon the Congressional policy outcomes whereas in others it looks like interest groups have no sway over policy outcomes (Smith 1995). Smith noted that the incongruence of the findings of quantitative researchers stem from another inconsistency: the operationalization of policy success. For example, is policy success defined by actively persuading individual members of Congress to vote in a particular way? Does it involve influencing groups of legislators? Does it entail the success of adding amendments to bills? These are legitimate questions that have not been resolved in the current corpus of literature, and Smith remarked that we cannot necessarily expect to resolve them in such a broad field of study.

Because the current research project focuses directly upon a public interest group, it is subject to many of the same problems that interest group scholars generally face. As the review of the literature will show, researchers who have studied the NGA also encounter the issue of whether to take a qualitative or quantitative approach. Additionally, they must also address the problem of how to measure influence or success. In the present study, both the methodological approach and the operationalization of the dependent variable were developed from recognizing that not one method is necessarily superior to others; a variety of such measures have been used.

To begin the task of examining the NGA as an interest group and to support the methodological approach and conceptualization of NGA success, the previous research on the NGA will be reviewed. First, however, it should be noted how the NGA, asa public interest group, differs from what can be thought of as