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AbstractPrior work examines how organization resources and types shape venue selection strategies. Both Congress and executive branch agencies can change policy, so interest groups must consider which of these venues to lobby on a given issue. We argue that factors in the political environment—venues' issue priorities and the power of groups' allies in a venue—influence how groups with different resource constraints select lobbying venues. Examining over one million issue-level lobbying disclosures filed between 2008 and 2016, we find that low-resource groups strategically lobby the venue(s) controlled by partisan allies and respond to the government's and public's issue priorities. Meanwhile, high-resource groups more often lobby all venues relevant to their issues regardless of the political environment, especially on issues gaining significant attention within government but not in the public. Our findings suggest that separation of powers provides high-resource groups more venues to lobby for favored policies. Conversely, low-resource groups strategically only lobby venues they have the potential to influence.

For decades, critics of pluralism have argued that the American interest group system exhibits a significantly biased distribution of policy preferences. We evaluate this argument by measuring groups' revealed preferences directly, developing a set of ideal point estimates, IGscores, for over 2,600 interest groups and 950 members of Congress on a common scale. We generate the scores by jointly scaling a large dataset of interest groups' positions on congressional bills with roll-call votes on those same bills. Analyses of the scores uncover significant heterogeneity in the interest group system, with little conservative skew and notable inter-party differences in preference correspondence between legislators and ideologically similar groups. Conservative bias and homogeneity reappear, however, when weighting IGscores by groups' PAC contributions and lobbying expenditures. These findings suggest that bias among interest groups depends on the extent to which activities like PAC contributions and lobbying influence policymakers' perceptions about the preferences of organized interests.