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

The prevailing view at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that the NGA is a very organized, well-respected interest group in Washington, D.C. Donald Kettl (2003a) of Governing magazine described the NGA as “long respected as a bipartisan Washington arm for research and lobbying,” and David Broder (2003) of the Washington Post referred to the NGA as “one of the most influential public lobbies in Washington” and has commented on the influence of governors elsewhere (Broder 2001). Some of this prestige stems from the NGA’s representation of the nation’s 50 state governors and perhaps from the institutional connections between governors and the federal government. Further, five of the last seven presidents have been governors and members of the NGA, three of whom were NGA chairs or NGA presidents. Recent presidential candidates, such as Howard Dean and Mike Huckabee, have also been prominent members of the NGA, and several former governors and members of the NGA have also worked in the executive branch of the federal government and in Congress. Of course, the tendency for governors to work at the federal level is not a recent trend; it has been very common for governors to move to the national level of government because of their knowledge of the issues at hand and their ability to appeal to statewide constituencies. However, many recent scholars believe that the NGA has an advantage in the interest group competition because of its “insider” role in the policy-making process in the nation’s capital (Cammisa 1995; Haider 1974).

Although the NGA is typically regarded as a successful interest group, very little research has been systematically conducted on the activities of the NGA to support this claim. Perhaps the lack of research is a result of the fact that researchers interested in the lobbying activities of the NGA have encountered many of the same problems as scholars who study interest groups in general. In this domain, political scientists have been largely unable