Lobbying and Policy Change Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why

Abstract

As readers will discover in the pages that follow, conducting the re search that produced Lobbying and Policy Change was a vast un dertaking. In fact, in our initial request for funding to the National Science Foundation, reviewers had such strong reservations about the feasibility of what we were proposing that we were given only a small amount of funds and essentially told to demonstrate that we could do it. We worked for two years and reapplied for full funding, which, happily, was awarded. Thanks f irst to Frank Scioli of NSF for believing in the project. While the project was feasible, it was not easy, and we could not have done it alone. We had an enormous amount of help from a small army of students, and no words can adequately express our appreciation for all that they did to make this book a reality. Here, however, we can at least publicly thank them for their hard work and dedication. Although the authors teach at four different schools, our project was headquartered at Penn State University, where Frank Baumgartner and Marie Hojnacki coordinated the work of most of our research assistants. Some students worked just for a semester; others worked with us for years. Some did work that was specialized; others became so valuable to us that we came to rely on them for many different tasks, including interviews in Washington, Web searching, designing the project Web site, checking the accuracy of work done by others, training new staff, developing coding schemes and then coding data, and even analyzing our results. In some cases, assistants became collaborators and their names appear on some of the conference papers and articles that grew out of the research.