| Chapter 2: | The NGA as a Public Interest Group |
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to generate a reliable research agenda when studying interest group activities. According to Daniel Tichenor and Richard Harris, “one of the most glaring limitations of interest group studies in its heyday was the enormous gap between ambitious theory building and decidedly modest empirical findings” (2005, 52). Richard A. Smith (1995) pointed to the major pitfalls that plague researchers in this field, arguing that the wide variety of methods that are employed in studying interest group policy influence provide a methodological richness to the field but that variation in methods makes it very difficult for researchers to agree upon a starting point or common point of reference with which to evaluate and coordinate their work.
As Smith noted, a primary methodological cleavage in this area occurs between scholars who employ quantitative methods versus those who employ qualitative methods in their analyses. Scholars who take a qualitative approach to their work contribute to the field by providing descriptively rich and theoretically rigorous research upon which other researchers can draw.1 The primary problem with this work, though, stems from the fact that in most cases, the research is not replicable. According to Smith, “Most of the research consists of narrative case studies, sometimes supplemented with interviews with lobbyists, congressional staffers, and members of Congress, that chronicle many alleged instances of how interest groups did or did not influence congressional outcomes in domestic policy” (Smith 1995, 117). Smith’s critique of methods that rely on case study and narrative research is not designed to raise questions of whether the research should be taken seriously. Rather, its purpose is to “remind readers that they have good reason to be skeptical of the veracity of many of the studies’ principal conclusions…” (Smith 1995, 122).
The solution to this problem, according to Smith, is to use more quantitative methods so that the research and the results