Intradisciplinary Communication

A decade ago, it was fairly common for students of law and courts to lament the lack of interdisciplinary communication between political scientists, law professors, and scholars from other disciplines (e.g., Cross 1997; Rosenberg 2000). Fortunately, much has changed in the past decade. Indeed, it is clear that there is a growing trend toward interdisciplinary in the study of law and courts. In my mind, this is a most welcome development. I am particularly excited by the incorporation of social psychological perspectives to explain judicial decision making, an approach that makes up the core basis for much of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making.

While I recognize the importance of interdisciplinary communication, one of things that has always struck me as odd is the lack of intradisciplinary communication among interest group scholars in political science. More specifically, it seems as if there are two communities of interest group scholars within political science: 1) those who study organizations in the courts and 2) those who study interest groups in the elected branches of government and/or among the more general populace. Even a cursory glance at the latter body of research reveals that students of interest groups in the elected branches rarely incorporate intuitions from interest group litigation research into their studies. This is unfortunate, for I am certain that these two groups of scholars have much to tell one another (see also Wasby 1997).

Recognizing this, Lisa Solowiej and I recently published an article that uses counteractive lobbying theory—originally developed to explain interest group interactions with member of Congress—to explain amicus curiae participation in the Supreme Court. In large part, our motivation for writing this article was to attempt to illustrate how interest groups lobbying the Court are often influenced by the same factors that shape interest group interactions with other political decision makers. In other words, we wanted to breakdown some of the barriers to intradisciplinary communication among political scientists studying interest groups.

Solowiej, Lisa A., and Paul M. Collins, Jr. 2009. “Counteractive Lobbying in the U.S. Supreme Court.” American Politics Research 37(4): 670-99. (gated; for a copy of the article, feel free to send me an email at pmcollins “at” unt “dot” edu.)

Theories of counteractive lobbying assert that interest groups lobby for the purpose of neutralizing the advocacy efforts of their opponents. We examine the applicability of counteractive lobbying to explain interest group amicus curiae participation in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions on the merits. Testing the counteractive lobbying hypotheses from 1953 to 2001, we provide strong support for the contention that interest groups engage in counteractive lobbying in the nation’s highest court. Our findings indicate that, like the elected branches of government, the Supreme Court is properly viewed as a battleground for public policy in which organized interests clash in their attempts to etch their policy preferences into law.

References

Cross, Frank B. 1997. “Political Science and the New Legal Realism: A Case of Unfortunate Interdisciplinary Ignorance.” Northwestern University Law Review 92(1): 251-326.

Rosenberg, Gerald N. 2000. “Across the Great Divide (Between Law and Political Science).” Green Bag 3(Spring): 267-72.

Wasby, Stephen L. 1997.  “Crosscutting the Subfields: Learning from our Colleagues.” PS: Political Science and Politics 30(4): 747-51.