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Darren Halpin (ANU) and Anthony Nownes (University of Tennessee)

Larry Saha Seminar Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University

What mix of issues will a given advocacy group define as broadly relevant? How will they then prioritize a sub-set of these issues to put on their policy agenda and closely monitor with an eye to progressing? And, how do they select the small number of issues will they then actually engage in advocacy on? Answers to these questions are highly salient for our understanding of the role of the organized interest system in modern democratic societies. For one, they help us to assess the dynamics that sift and filter salient voices and perspectives on public policy before they are evident in policy advocacy. Yet, such questions have garnered an unexpectedly low level of scholarly attention. The literature is heavily invested in the idea that advocacy organizations typically have broad policy interests and , set broad issue agendas and also monitor broadly, yet lobby narrowly (see Baumgartner and Leech 2001; Baumgartner et al. 2011). However, this orthodoxy has rarely been empirically explored, and certainly not via systematic scrutiny of how a set of groups sequentially resolve each of these questions. We suggest one reason for this inattention might be that scholars lack a strong conceptual language and a well-established set of methodological processes to scaffold empirical investigation. In this paper we set out to develop the necessary concepts and illustrate how they might be deployed empirically.

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