How do legislators' cognitive predispositions affect which organizations they listen to and which arguments they accept or reject? The popular portrayal of interest group influence in Congress is that well-heeled lobbyists pressure those in power to provide the groups they represent with special benefits such as tax concessions, lucrative government contracts, or sympathetic regulatory policies. Yet, many political practitioners and social scientists alike have long acknowledged that interest groups are an important part of the political system because they provide valuable information about policy proposals, constituent preferences, and political consequences to legislators. This study adopts the social cognition approach to decision making to learn how legislators' impressions about interest group coalitions affect how they evaluate and interpret information supplied by them. When receiving policy-relevant information from lobbyists, lawmakers are hypothesized to be motivated by existing attitudes towards interest groups and towards policies, meaning that evaluations of both the group's interests and the group's message affect how influential lobbyists may be. When lobbyists attempt to influence members of Congress who are relatively uninformed about a policy area, legislators will tend to rely on a .group interests. heuristic that cues them into whether or not the issue being advocated is important. On the contrary, when lobbyists target relative experts, legislators will be inclined to scrutinize and interpret the arguments being made. The student will recruit congressional staff to participate in an experimental study that simulates lobbying and agenda-setting under controlled conditions. By systematically manipulating the content and source of the lobby messages in an experimental setting, the student will be able to hypothetically test how legislators. perceptions of groups. interest bias their judgments about policy arguments, and vice versa. Broader Impacts: The implications for normative theories of interest representation are that policymakers are not merely passive lobbying targets who dispassionately deliberate over the pros and cons of all public policy proposals, but are rather selectively attentive participants whose perceptions are biased in favor of some interests over that of others. This study will therefore improve our understanding of the degree to which traditionally underrepresented groups are given serious attention in the policy process.
