Jeffrey M. Berry

• Professor at Tufts University

Conservatives are more likely than liberals to support the concept of federalism. In this article, we look at this support in the context of particular issues. Using multiple national surveys, including an original module on the 2020 Congressional Election Study, we find that conservatives are more likely to prefer a devolution of power to state an...

For several years, and through different administrations, surveys have shown that self-identified liberals are more likely than self-identified conservatives to avoid interactions with and exposure to ideological disagreement. In this study, we demonstrate that this ideological asymmetry in outgroup avoidance can be partially explained by the well-...

The political content on cable TV is symptomatic of the highly polarized era we live in. In this study of Fox and MSNBC, we sampled primetime evening programs on both and analyzed each major story presented. Our approach conceptualized each segment as a narrative and, as such, we coded the political arc of these stories and focused on the villains...

“Education,” notes Philip Converse, “is everywhere the universal solvent.” Whatever the ill of the body politic, many believe that greater education improves the condition. Much scholarship explores the impact of education on political attitudes and behaviors, but scholars have not examined the relationship of education to support for political com...

Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. By Nicole Hemmer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 336p. $34.95 cloth. - Volume 16 Issue 1 - Jeffrey M. Berry

As local governments have moved toward adopting sustainability policies, there have been some cases where local Tea Parties have emerged as aggressive and strident opponents of such changes. Looking broadly at the Tea Party movement across the United States and systematically measuring its influence in urban America, we assess each Tea Party chapte...

Negative Returns: The Impact of Impact Investing on Empowerment and Advocacy - Volume 49 Issue 3 - Jeffrey M. Berry

American cities vary considerably in the degree to which they pursue sustainability. What explains this variation? One plausible cause of such differences is that sustainability may be more appealing to high-income cities than to more economically challenged cities. Yet such strict economic determinism seems simplistic and removes politics from an...

Since political scientists were introduced to the concept of ‘the scope and bias of the pressure system’ by Schattschneider more than half a century ago, we have grappled with the lack of a standard against which to assess bias. Still, scholars have continued to address Schattschneider's provocative claim. This means that they must have in their mi...

Popular accounts of business involvement in politics typically suggest that business interests enjoy relatively unfettered success in getting what they want from government. Scholarly work is more equivocal. In this article we use a random sample of 98 policy issues between 1998 and 2002 to examine whether business interests and other advocates get...

Since 2009 the Tea Party has disrupted and deeply influenced American politics. The force of the movement has been felt not only in the three election cycles since then, but also in the development of public policy. One area where Tea Party influence has been said to be significant is in the area of environmental sustainability. As local government...

Strength in Numbers: The Political Power of Weak Interests. By GunnarTrumbull. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 264p. $49.95. - Volume 11 Issue 4 - Jeffrey M. Berry

Many cities across the United States have embraced programs aimed at achieving greater sustainability. This may seem surprising, particularly since adopting aggressive environmental protection programs is regarded by some as inimical to economic development. An alternative perspective is that in the modern city sustainability can be part of an econ...

As American business looks toward the future and its role in the policymaking process, it must consider how it is going to be affected by this country's ongoing demographic changes. As was the case in the 2012 elections, the changing face of American politics has the potential to produce a dramatic impact on the nature of business-government relati...

To what extent do local administrators include business interests in their informal bargaining and negotiation on issues involving economic development and environmental and sustainability policies? In the absence of previous studies, we extend political market theory to decisions involving administrative officials by investigating differences acro...

Although European cities have generally been regarded as far ahead of American cities in the degree to which they pursue sustainability, recent research suggests that U.S. cities are catching up. But why would this be? Is it possible that U.S. cities have been able to "close the gap" with European cities as a consequence of the development of local...

In Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science (1998), Frank Baumgartner and Beth Leech characterized a series of problems in the interest group research published between 1950 and 1995. In this essay, we assess whether recent research has become more theoretically coherent, more attentive to context, and broader...

There has been a long-standing concern about inequality in the representation of interests by organized groups and lobbyists in American politics. The lobbying community in Washington is dominated by corporations, trade associations and professional associations. In Lobbying and Policy Change, Baumgartner and colleagues find that interest group res...

Although we usually refer to the “Tea Party,” this movement is made up of hundreds of highly independent “Tea Parties.” Our paper explores the impact of this local control over the development of the advocacy that has emerged in the years since the movement began to take shape in the spring of 2009. Here we examine the localism of the Tea Party mov...

The number of radio stations airing political talk shows—predominantly conservative talk radio—has surged in the past few years. This massive change in the radio industry says something about the demand for such shows, but attributing the rise of talk radio to a corresponding rise in conservative popular opinion is misleading. We argue that this re...

Most research on incivility in American politics focuses on its effects on citizens' political attitudes and behaviors, in spite of remarkably little data on the extent to which political discourse is actually uncivil. Those studies that do examine content focus on negative campaign advertisements, overlooking more egregious forms of political inci...

How do nonprofits empower themselves? In this paper we analyze nonprofit advocacy in city politics, emphasizing especially their interaction with local policymakers. First we discuss what we call the “politics of place” in cities, examining the participation of three types of citywide and neighborhood nonprofits. The second section develops two lin...

This article explores the relationship between political and civic participation and the pursuit of sustainability in American cities. Some have argued that cities that exhibit more participation, engagement, and bridging social capital are more likely to pursue policies and programs designed to achieve greater sustainability. Others have posited a...

During the 2008 election season, politicians from both sides of the aisle promised to rid government of lobbyists’ undue influence. For the authors of Lobbying and Policy Change, the most extensive study ever done on the topic, these promises ring hollow—not because politicians fail to keep them but because lobbies are far less influential than...

We ask this question: Why do some cities decide to adopt policies and programs aimed at trying to become more sustainable, while other cities do not? We pursue our inquiry by closely examining surveys we conducted of city councilors and administrators in 50 large American cities. The specific focus is on the interaction between advocacy groups and...

American cities vary greatly in the degree to which they demonstrate a commitment to sustainability. Determining why some cities develop an array of programs designed to promote sustainability while others cities do little is a complex undertaking. We focus here on the interaction between various interest group sectors and city councilors. Our meas...

The Transformation of Plantation Politics: Black Politics, Concentrated Poverty, and Social Capital in the Mississippi Delta. By Sharon D. Wright Austin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 247p. $65.00. The title of Sharon Wright Austin's new book is intended to be ironic. As the author persuasively demonstrates, there has been no tr...

In years past interest group theory was deeply infl uenced by research on groups in cities, but more recent scholarship on interest groups has focused on national politics. To what degree do contemporary urban interest group systems fi t the models of national policymaking? In trying to answer this question we draw on a set of interviews with city...

There are approximately 800,000 501(c)(3) nonprofits large enough to register with the federal government. Add churches, foundations, and nonprofits too small to register, and the number is far higher than that. The potential for nonprofits to engage their clients and members in community affairs and public policy making is, in theory, enormous. Ye...

Nonprofit organizations are playing an increasingly important role in delivering basic government services. Yet they are discouraged by federal law from participating in legislative lobbying efforts —even on issues that affect their clients directly. Without the involvement of nonprofits in the governmental process, the vulnerable populations they...

Many of the early important empirical works on policymaking in Washington were built around elite interviews. We first learned about how Congress really operates from pioneers in elite interviewing such as Lewis Anthony Dexter (1969), Ralph Huitt (1969), and Donald Matthews (1960). No less revered is the scholarship of Richard Fenno (1978), John Ki...

Seit dem starken Anstieg der Zahl von Interessengruppen in den 60er Jahren versuchen Verbändeforscher zu bestimmen, welchen Einfluß diese Welle des Lobbyismus auf das politische System ausgeübt hat.1 Hat die veränderte Zahl der Gruppen zur Folge, daß die Lobbyisten insgesamt einflußreicher geworden sind? Sind innerhalb des Universums der Interessen...

The debate over social capital and civil society has focused largely on broad-brush assessments of participation in America and on what various measures of involvement in social and political life indicate about Americans. This study moves beyond general interpretations of societal trends to a detailed analysis of minorities in city politics. Drawi...

The debate over social capital and civil society has focused largely on broad-brush assess ments of participation in America and on what various measures of involvement in social and political life indicate aboutAmericans. This study moves beyond general interpretations of societal trends to a detailed analysis of minorities in city politics. Drawi...

The rise of liberal citizen groups that began in the 1960s has had a strong impact on the evolution of interest group advocacy. The success of these liberal organizations was critical in catalyzing the broader explosion in the numbers of interest groups and in causing the collapse of many subgovernments. New means of resolving policy conflicts had...

Berry examines alternative regulatory reform proposals which could lead to greater citizens group control over regulatory policy making. Citizens groups have been handicapped by problems of maintaining large-scale lobbying efforts, seeing little in the way of long-term rewards for accomplishing deregulation, being unwilling to play the Congressiona...

How and why do interest groups originate? Two major theories have been offered by David Truman and Robert Salisbury respectively, the former explaining the phenomenon in terms of "societal disturbance," the latter in terms of entrepreneurial skill. Berry has attempted to test the two theories through a survey of eighty-three public interest groups...

Brenda Maddox' Beyond Babel: New Directions in Communications (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972 -- $6.95) Paul Baran, The Future of Newsprint: 1970-2000 (R-16, December 1971, 49 pp., $6.00, paper) Paul Baran and Andrew J. Lipinski, The Future of the Telephone Industry: 1970- 1985 (R-20, September 1971, 172 pp., $15.00, paper) Gare LeCompte, Facto...

Project Summary We propose the expansion and continuation of research that was begun with our NSF-funded project from the January 1999 round of submissions (# SBR–9905195). In our original proposal we laid out a methodology for conducting interviews on a random sample of public policy issues and assessing the strategies and resources of lobbyists a...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.