Who Lobbies Whom? Special Interest Politics
under Alternative Electoral Systems
Megumi Naoi University of California, San Diego
Ellis Krauss University of California, San Diego
Why do some interest groups lobby politicians and others lobby bureaucrats? We theorize lobbying venue choices andintensity as a function of contract enforceability with policy makers, politicians, or bureaucrats. We argue that organizational
structures of interest groups, in particular, whether they are centralized or decentralized, substantially affect their lobbying
strategies because they are associated with different ability to monitor and enforce contracts with policy makers and punish
them when they fail. We further demonstrate that the effect of centralized versus decentralized structure on venue choices
is conditional on the types of electoral system: majoritarian, semiproportional (single, nontransferable vote: SNTV), or
proportional representation systems. We test this argument using longitudinal survey data on lobbying which span two
decades and cover around 250 interest groups in various sectors and issue areas in Japan. The results lend strong support toour argument about contract enforceability under alternative electoral systems.

H

ow do interest groups choose across different
venues of lobbying to influence policy? Why dosome interest groups lobby politicians and others lobby bureaucrats? These questions lie at the heartof much of the classic literature in political economy,
ranging from Madison and the Federalist Papers andDahl’s seminal study of pluralism in New Haven (Dahl
1963) through studies of corporatism (e.g., Schmitter &Lehmbruch 1979) to the collective action literature (e.g.,
Olson 1965). Yet the existing literature on lobbying tends
to ask to what extent interest groups influence policy
rather than a question of how they attempt to influence
it. In particular, the question of venue selection, i.e., howinterest groups choose across multiple venues of lobbying,has not been explored extensively to date.
In contrast to the existing approaches that theorize interest groups’ goals of lobbying as changing
legislators’ preferences or their policymaking resources(Hall and Deardorff 2006; McCarty and Rothenberg

1996; Walker 1991), we theorize lobbying as a function of contract enforceability with policy makers,
politicians, or bureaucrats. We argue that the organizational structures of interest groups, in particular,
whether organizational structures are centralized or decentralized, substantially affect their choice of lobbying strategies because they are associated with different ability to monitor and enforce contracts with policy makers and punish them when they fail. We further demonstrate that the effect of centralized versus
decentralized structure on venue choices is conditionalon the types of electoral system: majoritarian, semiproportional (single, nontransferable vote: SNTV), or
proportional representation systems. Under a highly
personalistic electoral system like SNTV, decentralizedgroups are more likely to go to a political route as they
are better able to monitor, enforce, and punish individual legislators in a district than centralized groups. Undera party-centered electoral system, such as a closed-list

Megumi Naoi is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0521(mnaoi@dssmail.ucsd.edu). Ellis Krauss is Professor, School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California,
San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0521 (ekrauss@mail.ucsd.edu).
The authors are very grateful to Michio Muramatsu and Ikuo Kume for sharing their data and inviting us to participate in their projects. The
data collection was financially supported by the MEXT (SPR-13002006, PI: Michio Muramatsu) and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(B-17330032, PI: Ikuo Kume). Christina Davis, Chris Kam, Masaru Kohno, Matt McCubbins, Ben Nybrade, Naoto Nonaka, T. J. Pempel,
Ethan Scheiner, Matt Shugart, Kengo Soga, Masahiko Tatebayashi, Yves Tiberghien, Langche Zeng, five anonymous reviewers, and theeditor provided invaluable feedback. Rob Pekkanen provided data on policy tribes. We thank Keiko Higuchi for data assistance and Kuniaki
Nemoto for research assistance. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2007 “International Workshop on Policy Networks,”
Kobe, Japan, the 2007 workshop on “Modeling Power Relationships in Japanese Democracy” at the University of British Columbia, and a
graduate seminar in Comparative Political Economy at UCSD.
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 53, No. 4, October 2009, Pp. 874–892!
C 2009, Midwest Political Science Association

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ISSN 0092-5853

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WHO LOBBIES WHOM?

proportional representation system, centralized groups
are more likely to go to a political route as they are better
able to enforce and punish politicians via political parties.
We leverage the case of Japan to test how interest
group organizations and electoral institutions interact toshape lobbying strategies for two reasons. First, it is advantageous because the electoral reform occurred without a major partisan change (Horiuchi and Saito 2003).
Second, postwar Japan provides a laboratory of electoral
systems because it has employed SNTV (pre-1994) andmajoritarian systems combined with proportional representation systems (post-1994). We use a longitudinal elite
survey data set of a large sample of interest group leaders at three data points spanning a quarter of a century.
We demonstrate that interest groups adapt their lobbying strategies to the change in electoral institutions inwhich they are embedded. Our argument proceeds in two
steps.
First, we theorize interest groups’ lobbying venue
choices and intensity as an effort to enforce and monitor acontract with politicians and hypothesize how various organizational structures of interest groups are linked with
their potential ability to make politicians commit to thiscontract. When the interest groups’ organizational structures allow more effective monitoring and punishment ofpoliticians who fail to commit (i.e., not to reelect or withdraw financial contributions), they are more likely to go toa political route. When their organizational structures do
not allow effective monitoring and punishment of politicians who shirk or renege, they are more likely to go to abureaucratic route to influence an earlier formulation or
implementation stage of policymaking.
Second, organized interests use various instruments
to punish politicians who shirk or renege on the contracts:
votes, candidate endorsement, and campaign contributions are the major examples. We construct typologiesof these punishment mechanisms into decentralized andcentralized instruments and discuss how the effectivenessof various instruments changed due to the 1994 electoral reform. We expect that the electoral reform froman SNTV system with multimember districts to a mixed
SMD/PR system decreases the effectiveness of the decentralized punishment mechanism (voting in a district orcandidate endorsement) while it increases the effectiveness of the centralized punishment mechanism (voting
for a party). Thus, the reform is expected to diminish thedifference between decentralized and centralized groups’
lobbying strategies. We find that our organizational structure argument explains variations across interest groups
as well as changes after the electoral reform controlling
for their organizational resources and for sectoral issue
areas.

Theories of Lobbying Venue Choices
Why do some interest groups lobby politicians, while others lobby bureaucrats? The question is at the heart of
why interest groups lobby. Two schools of thought haveemerged in the literature on the United States: one thattheorizes the interest groups’ goals of lobbying as changing or enhancing policy makers’ preferences (“preferencecentered approach”) and another that theorizes lobbying
as a function of organizational resources of interest groups
or legislators (“resource-centered approach”).

Preference-Centered Approach:
Exchange and Persuasion
The preference-centered approach views organized interests’ lobbying as an effort to change or align their preferences with legislators to achieve policy goals. In thisapproach, the two mediums that organized interests use
to shape legislators’ preferences are money and information. One argument, which is referred to as exchange
theories, focuses on the role of campaign contribution inbuying support from legislators. While the debates regarding what organized interests seek to buy—votes, access, or time of legislators—have advanced the literature,
the exchange theories still suffer from three major issues.
First, without a third-party enforcement or punishment, how do legislators and organized interests commit
to this quid quo pro exchange? The literature suggeststhat in such a “political market failure,” exchanges between legislators and organized interests are tacit, supralegal, and intertemporal in their nature and thus are
susceptible to legislators’ reneging and shirking (Halland Deardorff 2006; McCarty and Rothenberg 1996;
Snyder 1992; Stokes 2005; Weingast and Marshall 1988).
Yet empirical research on how legislators and organizedinterests seek to solve this political market failure is few
and far between.
Second, the empirical support for the money-buysvotes argument is weak in light of the findings that interest groups are much more likely to lobby their allies
than swing legislators or enemies (Bauer, Pool, and Dexter 1963; Hojnacki and Kimball 1998). This empiricalregularity not only holds in the context of the UnitedStates but also in Japan (Muramatsu and Kume 2006;
Sasaki et al. 1999).1 Stratmann (1998) also finds that a
1

The 2003 survey used in this article (see the “Data and Method”
section below for a detailed description of these surveys) also reveals that only 2.1% of interest group leaders choose “campaign
contribution” as the most important reason for why legislators assist their groups, which suggests that organized interests seem not
to be “buying” legislators’ votes, access, or time.

876
surprisingly small amount of money is at stake to buy
legislators’ votes in the United States. If the purpose oflobbying is to change legislators’ preferences, why wouldinterest groups waste lobbying efforts on their core supporters? Finally, the exchange theory does not accountfor why interest groups extensively lobby bureaucrats: the2003 survey done by the Muramatsu-Kume group reveals
that interest groups spend approximately 60% of theirlobbying efforts (i.e., frequency of personal contacts) withbureaucrats compared to 40% with politicians. With theirfocus on the role of money in changing legislators’ preferences, the exchange theories do not help us understandwhy interest groups lobby bureaucrats at all.
Another argument, which is referred to as persuasion theories, theorizes information transmission fromorganized interests to policy makers as a mechanism toenhance—rather than to change—policy makers’ preferences (Austen-Smith 1993, 1994; Hansen 1991; Wright1996). This approach views information asymmetry between legislators and organized interests as a key determinant of lobbying and explains several anomalies found in
the exchange theories, such as why interest groups lobby
allies more than swing legislators and why interest groups
lobby bureaucrats. Moreover, unlike the exchange theories in which “the money, not information or argumentsof the lobbyist, is the variable doing the behavioral work”(Hall and Deardorff 2006, 71), the persuasion theories
model the lobbying process more directly as information transmission via personal contacts and deliberations(Wright 1990).
Its weakness, however, is twofold. First, due to thedifficulty in systematically studying the process of private information transmission, empirical tests of these
theories have lagged far behind the theories (exceptions
are Furlong 1998; Golden 1998; Yackee and Yackee 2006).
Second, the persuasion theories assume that legislators
face uncertainty about constituents’ positions on a given
policy, and this uncertainty makes them rely on information provided by organized interests. This logic, however,does not account for why interest groups often lobby bureaucrats who do not face this need to learn constituents’positions.2
Finally, neither exchange nor persuasion theories
help us understand the prevailing patterns in the UnitedStates, Japan, or elsewhere in which interest groups lobby
legislators with whom they have a long-standing relationship. The 2003 Muramatsu-Kume Survey reveals that thehighest proportion of leaders (30%) say legislators assist
2

The argument also does not account for why some legislators
spend time meeting with interest groups that are not necessarily
from their districts, such as public interest environmental groups
and international NGOs.

MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSS

their groups because they agree with the group’s goal or
policy, 17% say it is because they have a long-term trustworthy relationship with a group, and 13% say legislators
assist their groups because they provide organized votes
during elections. Only less than 10% say it is because thegroup provides information. What, then, does it mean tobe “persuaded”?

Resource-Centered Approach
Contrary to the preference-centered views discussed
above, Hall and Deardorff (2006) propose a novel,
resource-centered argument. Direct lobbying, they argue, is a gift from organized interests to like-mindedlegislators in forms of information and subsidy to assist resource-scarce legislators to work at achieving a
policy. The lobbying-as-subsidy theory solves many
anomalies found in light of preference-centered approaches: why interest groups lobby allies more thanswing legislators, and why legislators often initiate contacts with organized interests. Yackee and Yackee (2006)
demonstrate that not just elected representatives, but also
bureaucrats are more likely to respond to big businessinterests than citizens as the former provide better quality information about complex policy issues. This line ofresearch suggests that the goal of a group’s lobbying withbureaucrats and politicians might be more similar thanthought (Niskanen 1975).
Walker (1991) proposes another resource-centeredmodel of lobbying. He argues that interest groups’ accessand proximity to elites in the Capitol versus local politicalactors in a district determine their lobbying strategies.
Localized groups are more likely to use “outside” lobbying strategies (i.e., mobilize grassroots organizations andthe public), while centralized groups are more likely towork through elites such as legislators and federal agencies (“inside” strategies; Kollman 1998). Holyoke (2003)
accounts for the venue choices by looking at the distribution of power between proponents and opponents of agiven policy in venues. In de Figueiredo and de Figueiredo(2002), interest groups’ choices among lobbying legislative, administrative, and legal institutions are determinedby the ideology of the court and the responsiveness of thecourt to resources. These resource-centered approaches
have an advantage over the preference-centered approach
because they simultaneously account for organized interests’ venue choices and intensity of lobbying. Yet the
puzzle still remains: how do interest groups cope with therisks of wasting their lobbying resources when legislators
face incentives to renege or shirk on promises?
Similar to Walker, we link centralized versus decentralized interest groups with their venue choices.

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WHO LOBBIES WHOM?

However, our approach departs from Walker’s in two major respects. First, we focus on organizational structure
rather than resources. We define decentralized organizational structures as local organizations’ potential ability
to make independent political decisions from the central headquarters, such as candidate endorsement, voteswitching, and campaign contribution. We demonstratethat even controlling for various measures of access andresources, our contractual approach better accounts forlobbying patterns. Second, in general, electoral institutions are missing from the lobbying literature. We analyze
how organizational structures of interest groups interact
with electoral institutions to shape their venue choices.

Lobbying as Contract Enforcement
We model interest groups’ lobbying venue choices andintensity as a function of their contract enforceability
with policy makers. Our contractual approach theorizes
interest groups’ goal of lobbying as an effort to enforce a
contract with legislators who are already sympathetic totheir preferred policies. Our approach accounts for major
puzzles about interest group lobbying in general and inJapan in particular: why do interest groups predominantly
lobby legislators who are already sympathetic to theirpolicy; why do they lobby legislators with a long-standing
relationship; and why do some groups lobby politicians
while others lobby bureaucrats?

Policymaking Environment: Electoral
Institutions and Legislative Organizations
To account for the major puzzles described above, we needto understand incentives of both the supply (legislators)
and demand side (organized interests) of lobbying. There
are two institutional characteristics that shape legislators’
incentives to form, renege on, or shirk the contract withspecial interests in Japan: electoral institutions and legislative organization (i.e., a committee system). In Japan,
under the SNTV system in which district magnitude generally ranged from one to five, same-party candidates ofthe largest ruling party, the Liberal Democrats, competed
for a seat. The SNTV system encourages individual legislators to cultivate “personal votes” rather than to collectively pursue a coherent party label (Cox and Thies 1998;
Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1994, and many others). Moreover, since votes that individual legislators win in a district are not transferable to other same-party candidates,individual legislators have incentives to specialize either
geographically (Hirano 2006) or sectorally (McCubbins

and Rosenbluth 1995) to differentiate themselves fromother same-party candidates (Tatebayashi 2004). Thus,
under an SNTV system, legislators’ incentives were to target narrow constituents (“specialization”) as opposed tobuilding a majoritarian coalition with broader and morediverse constituents.
Legislative organizations also mirror legislators’ personal vote incentives. The LDP’s policymaking organization under an SNTV system was decentralized andspecialized. The party decided policies through an extensive committee system (Policy Affairs Research Council; PARC), each of which oversaw corresponding cabinet
ministries and bureaucratic agencies (Cox and Rosenbluth 1995).3 The decentralized committee system also
gave policymaking power to party backbenchers whoneeded to credit-claim to special interests to mobilize
votes and campaign contribution (Rosenbluth and McCubbins 1995, 49). Accordingly, organized interests have
incentives to lobby individual legislators in a district,rather than lobbying through a party or party leaders. This
decentralized political structure lowers the enforceabilityof contract between legislators and centralized organizedinterests. First, individual legislators have incentives topursue their individual platform, and the party does not
function as an enforcer of a contract. Second, because
the PARC employs unanimity rules and the meeting is
not open to the interest groups or the public,4 organizedinterests have difficulty identifying who opposes versus
who supports a policy at the PARC meetings or any contribution made during the meetings.5 This is one of theconsequences of the one-party dominant, policymaking
environment before 1994 in which major policy decisions
were made within the ruling party rather than in the Diet.
This means that centralized groups without local organizations have difficulty monitoring and acquiring information about the extent to which politicians commit and3

Because the LDP was the ruling party for all but 10 months since
1955, essentially the basic content of policies was decided within
the LDP and only sometimes revised or slightly modified in theDiet (parliament) committees. Thus the LDP’s PARC was the more
important policymaking organ for the government.
4Interest groups can only attend the meetings if they are officiallyinvited for hearings.
5

Organized interests have two ways to deal with this lack of transparency at the PARC: one is to rely on media reporters who outside
the meeting rooms usually peep in and try to overhear the PARC
meetings from open doors, and another is to rely on self-reported
stories about the meetings told by politicians (for instance, many
politicians leak PARC debates on their blogs). These methods fallshort, however, as the media only covers debates surrounding major
legislations and politicians can exaggerate their contribution.

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MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSS

contribute to realizing their preferred policy.6 As a result, contract enforcement, monitoring, and punishment
mechanisms have to be decentralized and localized so thatinterest groups can hold individual politicians accountable to their promises.

Decentralized Lobbying as Contract
Enforcement under SNTV
Under the SNTV system described above, politicians andorganized interests exchanged promises during the election campaigns, but these contracts were susceptible tolegislators’ reneging and shirking. Organized interests
used various instruments to reduce wasting their lobbying
efforts, such as ex ante contracts and ex post punishment
and rewards.
Anecdotes suggest that legislators and special interests form such ex ante contracts in Japan. Aurelia George
Mulgan describes what a politician who specialized in the
agricultural sector had to go through to get the endorsement of a major agricultural group:
For Matsuoka to receive electoral support fromthe prefectural nouseiren (Agricultural Politics
Association), he had to demonstrate sympathy
for, and understanding of, the organisation’s
agricultural policy campaigns (nousei undou)
and to make a public promise of adherence toa position that would reflect the intentions ofNoukyou (Agricultural Cooperatives) along with
farmers in politics. In exchange for recommendation and authorisation (kounin mo suishinmo), he would have to sign a policy agreementwith the organisation and become a staunch
friend (meiyuu) of the league.7 (2006, 61; English
translation in parentheses added by authors)
Ex post monitoring and rewards for loyalty also
exist. Woodall (1996) documents that the large con6On the other hand, bureaucrats’ meetings on policy issues with
Advisory Councils (shingikai) where the majority of policy bills
are first formulated are generally open to the public. In addition,transcripts of discussions are also available to the public online at
ministries’ websites. Furthermore, Japanese bureaucrats are not politically appointed, either; almost all are selected by particular ministries after passing examinations and work for the same ministry
until their retirements except for brief stints at other agencies. Thus
the only potential source of shirking by bureaucrats, in addition to“laziness,” is the divergence between politicians’ and bureaucrats’policy preferences (“agency slack” problem which can be taken careof through politicians’ and interest groups’ “fire alarms”).

7

Matsuoka eventually became Minister of Agriculture in the first
Abe Cabinet, but investigations into his misuse of finances as a Diet
Member led him to commit suicide in May of 2007.

struction firms graded the politicians’ contributions todelivering their preferred policy and rewarded those withgood grades with larger biannual campaign contribution(Woodall 1996, 114).
Other anecdotes abound suggesting that politicians’
shirking may well be punished by organized interests.
In 1979, local Agricultural Cooperatives (Noukyou) in
Aomori and Akita prefectures decided to switch their endorsement from the LDP to the Japan Communist Party
candidates for the lower-house election. The head of theAgricultural Cooperatives in Akita prefecture said:
There was only one (LDP) lower-house representative from Akita prefecture who attended our
big meeting to discuss the issue of rice price lastyear. It showed the serious lack of interests of
Akita (LDP) representatives in helping farmers
out. We were very frustrated. Except for one,all of our 19 committee members for the candidate endorsement were conservatives (i.e., the
LDP supporters). But we decided to endorse Mr.
Nakagawa (of the JCP) who has worked hardfor us. . . . This was very effective—after the election, the LDP politicians treat us much better
when we lobby them. Their attitudes completelychanged. (Interview documented in Tachibana
1984, 352–53. Translation by the authors. Parentheses added by authors)
The above examples illustrate the importance of ourcontractual approach. Even special interest politicians—
those who are already sympathetic to given organizedinterests—can renege on the contract with interest groups
or shirk on the effort to realize a policy. Incentives torenege or shirk can be political (e.g., the party orders
them to do otherwise or there are conflicts of interest in a
district; see fn. 8) or efficiency driven (e.g., allocate theirresources to mobilize swing voters, while keeping the core
constituents’ votes), but either way, such incentives may
be prevalent as seen in the above episode.
Organized interests use various ways to reduce therisk of such political market failure.8 The first is gathering and distributing information about politicians’ levelsof commitment to a given special interest. The above
8

The most drastic solution to this contractual problem is to send
their own members to the Diet (Gehlbach, Sonin, and Zhuravskaya2008). The head of Agricultural Cooperative in Miyazaki prefecture
said: “We need to send our own people to the Diet. . . . The LDP’s
self-claimed ‘agricultural politicians (nousei-ha)’ pretend like they
support farmers, but when necessary, they defect us by choosing toabide by the party order. We need someone—the true supporters offarmers—who will break away from the party to support farmers
when they have to” (Tachibana 1984, 355).

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WHO LOBBIES WHOM?

examples suggest, indeed, that interest groups gather information about how serious politicians are committed
by monitoring their levels of participation in the meetingsand other activities in the Diet and in their constituencies. The organizational structures of interest groups affect their ability to gather and distribute information andmonitor politicians’ activities. Information and monitoring of the politicians’ district activities and responsiveness to the local interests may be more costly to acquireand coordinate for centralized interest groups without local organizations than decentralized interest groups withboth headquarters in Tokyo and local organizations in
districts. This is due to the lack of transparency at the
PARC meeting, as discussed previously, and local organizations’ geographic proximity to local representatives.9
The second way to deal with the commitment failure
is to effectively punish politicians who renege or shirk.10
The organizational structures of interest groups affecttheir effectiveness to punish in two ways. First, decentralized interest groups can punish individual politicians
running in electoral systems with local districts (SNTVor SMD) by withdrawing political support without coordinating their actions across districts. For instance, theanecdote of Akita prefecture demonstrates that while thenational-level Agricultural Cooperative was a supporterof the LDP, the local-level offices had autonomy to maketheir own political decisions, e.g., endorsing a candidate from a different party. The local-level offices, notthe national-level office, were the ones that were votemobilizing organs during the election campaigns.11
On the other hand, interest groups with centralized
structure face several difficulties in monitoring and punishing politicians who did not deliver the promised policy
benefits, particularly under a highly personalistic system
like the SNTV system. Organized interests with a centralized structure, such as the Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren; big business’s peak association),
have used political donations as a means to reward or
9

For instance, Agricultural Cooperatives that have headquarters inTokyo and local organizations in all of the 47 prefectures have better ability to monitor and enforce contracts than an Associationof Mega Banks which only has headquarters in Tokyo. The proximity of local organizations to the Diet Member (favor giver) also
allows him or her to monitor the interest groups’ living up to theirside of the bargain too, making commitments more credible andmonitoring more effective. See Stokes (2005).

10
Politicians also have various ways to avoid the punishment, suchas to shift blame to bureaucracy, opposition parties, foreign countries (“gaiatsu”; see Schoppa 1997), or intraparty conflicts.
11
Indeed, Tachibana (1984) suggests that the Agricultural Cooperative is decentralized fiscally and politically despite its formal rulethat “all the members have to abide by the headquarter’s (chuoukai) orders” (355).

punish the political parties. They lack, however, the decentralized mechanism to punish individual politicians
running from majoritarian districts who renege or shirk.
For instance, after the major defections by some LDP
politicians to oppose the 2005 postal reform legislation,
Keidanren’s president Okuda announced that “Overall,
Keidanren supports the LDP, but how our member company deals with individual district cases is up to them.”
In other words, Keidanren can collectively act at the center on whether to grant political donations to politicalparties, yet they could not coordinate their actions acrosslocal districts to mobilize or withdraw political support.
It is thus likely that interest groups that have localorganizations are more likely to lobby politicians because
they are in a better position to monitor and punish apolitician in his or her district.12 Centrally organizedgroups without local organizations are more likely to go
to the national bureaucracy to influence different stagesof policymaking such as drafting and implementation ofpolicies that were passed.
H1: Decentralized interest groups are more likely to lobby
politicians than centralized interest groups without
local organizations under the SNTV system before
1994.

The Electoral Reform: SMD/PR System
The electoral reform of 1994 to the SMD/PR systemchanged the policymaking environment in two ways: (1)broadening and diversifying the scope of constituents
whom legislators need to target and (2) centralizing policymaking power to party leaders (see Table 1). The new
SMD/PR system allocates 300 seats for SMD and 180 seats
for a closed-list PR system with 11 regional blocks. Voterscast two votes, one for a candidate from the SMD district
and another for a party, and these votes are separate.
First, under the SMD, a single representative must
win and represent the whole district with a diverse constituency (Krauss and Pekkanen 2004, 10–12). This weakens legislators’ incentives to pursue the personal vote andinstead strengthens their incentives to build a broader,majoritarian coalition with diffused and organized interests. Second, since only one candidate from different
parties competes for a seat, the reform strengthens legislators’ incentives to pursue party label. The SMD also
12
Another reason for why interest groups with local organizations
are more likely to lobby politicians is that the proximity makes it
easier to access politicians. The “access” argument remains insufficient, however, because the majority of lower-house representatives
spend half of their time in Tokyo and the other half in their own
districts, and the majority of organized interests surveyed haveheadquarters or local branches in Tokyo.

880

TABLE 1MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSSPolicymaking Environment and Lobbying Strategies
Policymaking Structure(Contract Enforcement)
Decentralized
Centralized
Narrow

Scope of Legislators’ Target

Broad

SNTV
(Pre-reform)

Closed-List PR(post-1994)“Decentralized Lobbying”“Centralized Lobbying”

SMD(post-1994)

SMD(post-1994)“Continuing decentralized
lobbying, but weaker due tothe broader coalition”“Centralized Lobbying
due to the party-centerednomination process”

centralizes the power structure within parties because
legislators depend on party nominations to win seats(Asano 2006). Third, under the closed-list PR, the parties
choose the candidates and their ranking on the list. Thus,
parties have greater control over their individual legislators than when they were under SNTV (Shugart 2001).
Voters also must cast a vote for a party under a PR system,
which weakens the tie between individual legislators andelectorates.
Legislative organizations adapt to legislators’ newincentives shaped by the electoral reform (Pekkanen,
Nyblade, and Krauss 2006). After the electoral reformbill was passed, the LDP stopped limiting its representatives’ PARC affiliations to a maximum of four committees
and allowed anyone to join as many committees as he or
she wished. The LDP recognized that its representatives
need to be more policy generalists to win single-member
districts (Krauss and Pekkanen 2004, 17–20). The policymaking power has also shifted from individual politicians to party leaders and the cabinet (“centralization”;
Muramatsu and Kume 2006). Table 1 summarizes our expectations of how the policymaking environment shapes
lobbying strategies before and after the electoral reform.
Interest groups should adapt their lobbying strategies to legislators’ new incentives. First, the centralizationof policymaking means that the effectiveness of the decentralized monitoring and punishment mechanism (i.e.,
withdrawing votes or candidate endorsement in a district)should decrease under the SMD/PR system. The decentralized punishment is less effective for the regional block
PR portion as it encompasses more diverse sectors andgeography than the previous SNTV districts. The SMD

portion also forces representatives to build broader majoritarian coalitions in constituencies than under SNTV
(McGillivray 1997, 2004; Rogowski and Kayser 2002).13
This means that decentralized interest groups will continue to lobby SMD representatives via local organizations, although this incentive might be weaker thanunder SNTV as they face more difficulty monitoring andenforcing a contract with legislators in districts. Instead,decentralized groups will also begin lobbying legislators
through the central channel (i.e., headquarters) to influence the party decisions. On the other hand, we would
expect that the centralized interest groups lobby politicians more than the previous two surveys. This is because
they can use the centralized punishment mechanisms, i.e.,
using PR votes to political parties under the new electoral
system. Thus Japan’s mixed electoral system provides incentives for interest groups to centralize their lobbying
strategies. These expected changes lead us to hypothesize:
H2: Centralized interest groups will be more likely tolobby politicians after the reform than in the previous SNTV period. Decentralized groups will be
more likely to centralize their lobbying strategies
13

McGillivray (1997, 2004) also demonstrates that in majoritariansystems, legislators are more likely to target core supporters under a weak party discipline, while they are more likely to target
swing voters under a strong party discipline. While this theory
offers predictions regarding legislators’ targeting incentives (thevertical axis of our 2×2 shown in Table 1), we could derive consistent predictions on our enforceability of contracts from it. Whiletargeting swing voters can mean lower enforceability with individual legislators, strong party discipline means party functions as areliable enforcer of the contract—thus, centralization of lobbying
strategies.

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WHO LOBBIES WHOM?

TABLE 2The Effectiveness of Decentralized versus Centralized Punishment Mechanism

Organizational Structures
Local Org
(Decentralized)

No Local Org(Centralized)

Instruments
Decentralized-voting-candidate endorsement-political funds
Centralized-party votes-political funds

Survey 1
1980
SNTV

Survey 2
1994 (1993)
SNTV

Survey 3
2003
SMD/PR++

Weaker effects

difficult due tocoordinationdifficult due tocoordination+

Note: + refers to effectiveness of instruments.

by shifting allocation of lobbying efforts from localorganizations to the central office than in the previous period.

H3: After campaign finance reforms, centralized groups
will be more likely to lobby politicians than they were
before the reform.

Corollary 2–1: Thus differences between centralized anddecentralized interest groups will be reduced after
electoral reform compared to the previous SNTV
period.

The above hypotheses are summarized in Table 2.

Another major institutional reform that may increase
the effectiveness of the centralized punishment mechanism (i.e., withdrawing campaign contribution or party
votes) is the 1994 campaign finance reforms—passedalong with the electoral reform—that restricts the contributions of organizations to individual politicians. The
revision of the Regulation on Political Funds (Seiji Shikin
Hou Kisei), which was phased in during 2000, limits organized interests’ political donations in two ways. First,
organized interests or a firm can contribute the maximum of 50 million Yen per one political party and a totalof 100 million Yen per year. Second, the revision also
limits the channels in which organized interests can contribute political donations. Direct donations to individual
politicians are prohibited after the revision (Ministry ofInternal Affairs and Communication 2009) as are donations to party factions that used to distribute funds tothe individual politician. Much of the campaign funding now is routed through the political party. Therefore,
campaign finance reform should reinforce the effect ofelectoral reform on lobbying: for the centralized interest
group, their ability to punish politicians via the campaign
contribution route should increase after the reform; onthe other hand, decentralized groups’ ability to punish individual politicians may diminish, and they might channel campaign contribution via the central office after thereform.14

The three interest group surveys conducted by the
Muramatsu-Kume group in 1980, 1994, and 2003 provide
data on 200–300 interest group organizations for eachsurvey that ranges from peak associations of various industries to nongovernmental organizations and religious
groups. The surveys were conducted by a professional survey research firm in Japan on a sample of interest groupleaders. The sampling procedure is described in detail in
the appendix. We use each interest group organization
as a unit of analysis and analyze their choice of lobbying
venues and intensity for each of the three surveys.15 The
models estimated have the following structure:

14
Taniguchi (1999) argues that due to loopholes in this law, interest groups can contribute unlimited donations to local party

Data and Method

Lobbying Politicians i= !1 ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES i+ !2 RESOURCES i+ !3 ISSUES/SECTORS i + εi

Our first data point (1980) is the height of the LDP
dominance. Our second data point (1994) is right after the
LDP lost power briefly, but since the survey asks interest
groups about the time period prior to electoral reform, it
is about the early 1990s period when the LDP had beenbranches, which are essentially run by individual legislators. Welack the data to test whether organized interests’ political donations to local branches increased or decreased due to the campaign
finance reform.
15
See fn 22 for detailed discussion of why we did not pool data
across three surveys.

882

MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSSin power for almost 45 years. Our third data point is2003 when the LDP had been back in power about eight
years and after electoral reform with two elections under
the new mixed electoral system. These data provide a
detailed picture of the interest groups’ lobbying activities
in which 339 of 734 are the same interest groups over aquarter of a century. To capture both the venue choice andintensity of the lobbying activities, we use two different
operationalizations of “venue selection” as our dependent
variable.

The Dependent Variable: Relative versus
Absolute Choice of Venues
While existing studies tend to theorize multiple venues
are mutually exclusive, i.e., interest groups choose one
venue or the other, in reality, the choice of venue is rather
relative. The majority of interest groups lobby both politicians and bureaucracy but strategically allocate their lobbying resources—such as time and human capital—tothese venues to maximize their chances of achieving policy goals. In order to capture the interest groups’ decision,
we create an index of relative allocation of interest groups’
resources for lobbying politicians versus bureaucrats. We
do so by using the following question:
When your group approaches an administration,
how often do you contact people in the following
positions?
Respondents choose their level of frequency of contact on
a 5-point scale (1: Very Frequent; 2: Frequent; 3: Not so
often; 4: Rare; and 5: Not at all) for each of the following
10 positions: (1) Prime Minister, (2) Chief Cabinet Secretary, (3) Minister, (4) Deputy Minister, (5) ParliamentaryVice-Minister, (6) Permanent Vice-Minister, (7) Director,(8) Section Manager, (9) Assistant Section Manager, and(10) Chief Clerk.16
16
A potential issue with using this questionnaire is that it limits
the universe of “bureaucrats and politicians” to those who holdimportant positions in a government. The benefit of using thisquestion, on the other hand, is that it captures groups’ contacts
with politicians and bureaucrats that actually matter for policymaking and implementation. Moreover, Deputy Minister and Parliamentary Vice Ministerial positions are usually given to junior to
mid-career politicians (mean numbers of terms served are three).
Another advantage of using this questionnaire is its specificity regarding which government positions interest groups contact. Whilea questionnaire such as “how often do you contact politicians (orbureaucrats)” (this question does not exist in this survey) may seembetter because it captures interest groups’ contact with a broader
spectrum of politicians and bureaucrats, defining who constitutes
politicians or bureaucrats is often ambiguous and may suffer fromthe lack of comparability across interest groups’ responses.

We categorize these 10 positions into two groups, onewith positions held by politicians (1 to 5) and by bureaucrats (6 to 10).17 We transform this five-scale responseso that the higher the value, the more frequent an interest group contacts a given position (4. Very Frequent, 3.
Frequent, 2. Not so often, 1. Rare, 0. Not at all). We aggregate these data on the frequency of contacts by interest
groups with politicians (variable named “Pol Contact”)
and bureaucrats (“Bu Contact”) and calculate the totalfrequency of contacts for each interest group per survey.
Then we calculate the percentage of the total contacts with
politicians (“%Pol Contact”). The percentage variable isonly calculated for the second (1994) and the third surveys (2003) because the first survey (1980) only includes
two political positions (Prime Minister and Ministers) in
the questionnaire and thus lacks comparability. Second,
we separately analyze the level of lobbying activities (asopposed to the relative allocation) to politicians and bureaucrats using the same covariates to see whether there isa systematic difference in characteristics of interest groups
that lobby politicians and that lobby bureaucracy.
Our main independent variable is whether an interest group has local organizations that could potentiallymake independent decisions about candidate endorsement, vote switching, or campaign contribution to legislators. We proxy the centralized versus decentralizedorganizational structure with interest groups’ response toa questionnaire on whether the interest group has localorganizations or not (variable named “Local Org”). While
the majority of interest groups that have local organizations in these surveys have headquarters in Tokyo, we
differentiate groups that have headquarters in Tokyo andgroups that have headquarters outside of the Tokyo vicinity to parse out Walker’s (1991) access argument from ourorganizational structure argument. “No Tokyo HQ” takes
a value of one if a group has headquarters outside of theTokyo vicinity and zero otherwise.18

Alternative Hypotheses and Controls
Organizational Resources. The first alternative hypothesis we test is that the interest groups’ organizational
resource might better account for lobbying patterns
17

There have been three ministerial positions during the three survey periods that were held by nonelected members: Saburo Ohki
(Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1980), Ryoko Akamatsu (Minister of
Education, 1994), and Heizo Takenaka (Minister of Finance Related
Matters, 2003). We tried to test the effect of having nonelected ministers on an interest group’s lobbying strategy, but we were unable
to test it due to the lack of panel data on interest groups that fallunder jurisdictions of these three ministries.
18

These No Tokyo HQ organizations tend to be religious or civilsociety groups.

883

WHO LOBBIES WHOM?

(de Figueiredo and de Figueiredo 2002; Olson 1965). In
particular, groups that provide organized votes or campaign contribution might prefer to go through a politicalroute while weaker interests might prefer to go throughan administrative route. We include three variables. The
larger the size of membership (logged “ln membership”),
the more likely that an interest group lobbies politicians.19 We also expect that the number of special interest
politicians who represent a given sectoral interest (“Policy Tribes”) should have positive effects on the interest
group’s decision to lobby politicians. The data on special
interest politicians is matched with eight different typesof sectoral interests, such as agriculture, welfare, industry
and economy, defense, and labor.20 Alternatively, groups
may either send current members to parliament or appoint legislators on their executive board to enhance theirconnections with politicians. “Current MPs” takes a valueof one when a group’s member is a member of parliamentand zero otherwise.
We also include two variables that measure thestrength of interest groups’ connections with bureaucrats. “Advisory Council (Shingikai)” takes a value of one
when a group has a membership at advisory councils
at ministries where potential legislations are discussedwith bureaucrats and experts. “Retirement position” takes
a value of one when a group offers a retirement position
for government officials (Amakudari), and zero otherwise. Finally, a long time-horizon and repeated interaction among actors make monitoring and enforcementof contracts with politicians easier (Axelrod 1984; Grief,
Milgrom, and Weingast, 1994; Snyder 1992).Thus, the ageof the interest group as of the survey date is calculated by
the year of the survey minus the year of the organization’s
establishment (“Group Age”).

us to identify any agency slack that exists between a particular Ministry and legislators (McCubbins and Schwartz
1984). We expect that agricultural interests will consistently select politicians more than bureaucrats to lobby.
Conversely, industry organizations with its diversity anddispersion across different electoral districts will choose tolobby bureaucrats more, as will labor since it has few close
connections to the conservative LDP.21 We also include adummy variable (“SM-sized Industry”) for organizations
dominated by small and medium-sized firms as small to
medium-sized firms are more likely to be geographicallyconcentrated in districts, and they have been a strong
supporter of the LDP.
The sectoral analysis is insufficient when
globalization—freer movement of goods, capital,and labor—generates economic winners and losers
21
Surprisingly, labor groups’ contact scores with politicians
holding important positions in the government do not differ
systematically from non-labor groups or even from agriculturalgroups which have been known to have close connections with
the LDP (see table below). However, if we use another set ofquestionnaires, which asks groups’ frequency of contacts with eachof the major political parties, labor groups do lobby opposition
party politicians more than other groups, especially the DPJ and
SDP politicians (see figure below). Those who study Japaneselabor politics have shown that labor achieved their desired policy
outcomes (e.g., higher wages and unemployment insurance)
through within-enterprise labor unions, not through nationallyorganized labor unions or the opposition parties (Kume 1998).

1980
1994
Labor
1.50
l.41
1.47
1.26
Non Labor
Agriculture
1.48
1.26
Note: An ordinal variable ranging from 0 to 3.

Labor versus Agricultural Groups: Party-Level Contact
Scores for the Third Survey (0: Not at all to 4: Very often)

Issue Areas and Sectors. The second alternative hypothesis is that the sectoral or issue characteristics affect interest
groups’ lobbying strategies (Alt et al. 1999; Hiscox 2002;
Magee, Brock, and Young 1978). We include a dummy
variable for interest groups in agriculture (“Agriculture”),
industry (“Industry”), and labor (“Labor”) to control forthe sectoral and issue effects. Sectoral dummies also allow
19

We dealt with missing values for the membership variable asfollows. If a given group’s membership information is available forthe second or third waves of the survey, we use its response toa questionnaire on its membership during the past 20 years in a
10-year interval.
20

Special interest politicians (policy tribes or “zoku”) were definedand operationalized as those veteran politicians who have served in
key executive positions such as the party’s Policy Affairs ResearchCouncil (PARC), Diet Committees, and subcabinet and cabinet
positions over time in a particular issue area. We follow the codingof Satō and Matsuzaki (1987) and Inoguchi and Iwai (1987).

2003
1.40
1.33
1.24

LDP: Liberal Democratic Party
DPJ: Democratic Party of Japan (the largest opposition party)
SDP: Social Democratic Party
JCP: Japan Communist Party

884

MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSSTABLE 3

Descriptive Statistics

Variable

Obs

Mean

Std. Dev.

Min

Max

Pol Contact (survey 1)
Pol Contact (survey 2)
Pol Contact (survey 3)
Bu Contact (survey 1)
Bu Contact (survey 2)
Bu Contact (survey 3)% Pol Contact
Local Org

252
247
235
252
247
235
692
724

1.357143
1.283401
1.344681
1.563492
1.5668021.625532−3.31192.7348066

1.06344
1.119237
1.152998
1.013817
1.071902
1.072275
4.72913.4417413

0
0
0
0
0
0
−11.51292
0

3
3
3
3
3
3
11.51292
1

No Tokyo HQ
ln membership
Current MPs
Policy Tribes
Advisory Council

734
516
713
734
729

.020436
10.40358.2328191
16.30654.6406036.1415827
2.983749.4229246
24.08568.48015303.135494000116.86194
1
83
1

Retirement
SubsidyGroup Age
Regulation
Agriculture

727
721
725
706
734

.2572215.22191435.56828
1.338527.113079.4374034.4158221
18.62074
1.282778.3169053

0
0
2
0
0

1
1
125
3
1

Labor
SM-sized Industry
International

734
252
470

.1566757.1944444.106383.3637427.39656.3086557

0
0
0

1
1
1

within a sector (Milner 1988). We expect that those who
stand to benefit from globalization are more likely to go
to bureaucrats as they tend to have the upper hand innegotiating with foreign countries (Davis 2003, 2004),
while those who stand to lose are more likely to go topoliticians for compensation and protection. To test
this, a variable “International” is included which takes avalue of one when a group has a foreign office and zerootherwise.
We also control for the nature of contacts between interest groups and bureaucrats/politicians. “Subsidy” takes
a value of one and zero otherwise when interest groups
receive subsidy from the government. In order to test
whether heavily regulated groups are more likely to go tobureaucrats, we create an index of regulation (“Regulationindex”) by aggregating the interest group’s zero (No) andone (Yes) response to the following three questions: “Do
you receive a license or permission from a government?”,“Are you a subject of legal regulations by a government?”,
and “Do you receive administrative guidance from a government?” A detailed description of these variables is in
Table 3.
The electoral reform of 1994 is an intervening variable
that affects the relationship between the characteristics ofinterest groups and their lobbying strategies. We analyzeeach survey separately and infer the effects of the electoral reform by deducing expected changes in the typesof interest groups that go to politicians or bureaucrats
between the 1994 and the 2003 surveys.22

Estimations
Our first dependent variable is an aggregation of six to 10“contact scores” with politicians and bureaucrats. Since
a response category for each of the questionnaires ranges
from zero (“not at all”) to four (“very often”), the total
contact score is an ordered, categorical dependent variable that can theoretically range from zero to 40 (four22

Alternatively, we pooled the data across the three surveys andinclude interaction terms between each of the three survey-year
dummy variables (0–1) and our main independent variable Local Org (0–1). The results confirm our theory. Despite the pooledmodel’s confirmation of our theory, however, we present separate
models for each of the three surveys for the following three reasons: (1) parameter heterogeneity issue (see Heinline 2008; Western1998), (2) difficulty interpreting the substantive effects of interaction terms in ordered logit models (see Ai and Norton 2003, 129),(3) a better way to present our results leveraging 144 groups thatwere consistently surveyed in the second and third surveys (seeFigure 1).

885

WHO LOBBIES WHOM?

multiplied by ten). We categorize the data into four levels of contact (0: not at all; 1: sometimes; 2: frequent;and 3: very frequent) and analyze the data with an ordered logit estimation. Our second dependent variable
is the allocation of lobbying efforts to politicians relative
to bureaucrats as described previously. This is a continuous percentage variable ranging from zero to one andis transformed as follows Ln Y = ln(Y/(1 − Y)) to allow
OLS estimation (“perc pol contact”).23

Results
Tables 4 to 7 show coefficients estimates of variables on
the choice of lobbying strategies. The results lend strong
support to our organizational structure argument evenafter controlling for organizational resources, issue areas,
and the nature of contacts. We discuss specific results
below.

Organizational Structures: Centralized
versus Decentralized Groups
Table 4 shows the results on the frequency of contacts with
politicians. The effects of organizational structures of interest groups are significant for their decisions to lobby
politicians under the SNTV system. Under the SNTV system, decentralized interest groups are more likely to go
to a political route when they lobby than centralized interests, confirming Hypothesis 1. The results are robustwith relative operationalization of “lobbying politicians”
as presented in Table 5.
The substantive impact of the effects of the organizational structures on lobbying is quite large. Table 6
presents the simulated effects of groups having local organizations on their frequency of lobbying with legislators.
During the second survey (1994), the predicted probability of centralized interest groups not contacting legislators
at all (Y = 0) is 33% higher than decentralized interest groups. On the other hand, the predicted probability of decentralized interest groups contacting politicians“sometimes” is 40% compared to centralized groups’
18%. The probability of contacting politicians “frequently” is 12% for decentralized groups and 3% for centralized groups. In Table 5, a one-unit shift from no localorganization to having local organizations increases therelative allocation of lobbying efforts to politicians around
44 percentage points (e.g., 6–50%) in the second survey.
23

We thank Langche Zeng for suggesting this.

TABLE 4

Ordered Logit Estimates of theFrequency of Lobbying with
Legislators (Controlling for
Bureaucratic Contact)
1980

Organizational Structures
Local Org
0.926
(2.02)∗∗No Tokyo HQ(“Access”)
Organizational Resources
0.031
ln membership(0.56)
Current MPs
0.688(1.95)∗
Policy Tribes
Advisory Council
Retirement
Group Age

0.669
(2.06)∗∗
0.313(0.64)
0.021(1.48)

Sectors and Issues
Subsidy−0.521(1.35)
Regulation−0.102(0.83)
Agriculture−0.545(0.97)
Labor−0.490(1.23)Bu Contact
0.334(6.05)∗∗∗
SM-sized Industry
0.121(0.30)
International
cut 1
cut 2
cut 3
Obs

4.020
(0.855)5.676(0.905)7.482(0.967)
184

1994

2003

1.635
(3.72)∗∗∗−31.793(0.00)

0.684(1.57)
3.454(3.28)∗∗∗

0.167(2.63)∗∗∗
0.342(0.91)−0.004(0.60)
0.467(1.31)
0.197(0.47)
0.050(4.49)∗∗∗−0.109(1.57)−0.403(0.90)
0.008(0.79)
0.334(0.82)−0.424(0.93)
0.016(1.52)−0.044(0.11)−0.393(2.44)∗∗−1.346(2.23)∗∗−0.383(0.82)
0.268(6.48)∗∗∗

0.006(0.01)−0.488(2.94)∗∗∗
0.109(0.22)−0.593(0.68)
0.378(6.93)∗∗∗

1.077(1.40)
6.009(1.044)8.064(1.141)9.758(1.208)173

0.503(0.82)
2.676(0.925)4.219(0.976)5.644(1.028)134

Absolute value of z statistics in parentheses.
∗
significant at 10%; ∗∗ significant at 5%; ∗∗∗ significant at
1%. No Tokyo HQ is dropped from the model (1) due tocollinearity.

886

TABLE 5MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSSSimulated Effects of Groups Having
Local Organizations on the
Frequency of Lobbying with
Legislators (1994 Survey)
Local Org (1)Not at All (0)Sometimes (1)Frequent (2)Very Frequent (3)0.448(0.144)0.397(0.084)0.120(0.06)
0.035(0.024)

No LocalFirst
Org (0) Difference
0.780(0.118)0.180(0.091)
0.031(0.024)0.008(0.008)−0.333(0.093)0.217(0.074)0.089(0.044)0.027(0.019)Note: The ordered logit estimates are from Table 4. The predictedprobabilities are simulated using CLARIFY software available at
http://gking.harvard.edu/clarify. Standard errors in parentheses.

The Effect of Electoral Reform
After the electoral reform (2003), the overall intensity oflobbying with politicians has increased. Among the 144groups that were consistently surveyed for the second andthe third survey, the average contact scores have increased
three points on a 16-point scale (3.7 to 6.9). This is consistent with our contractual approach that interest groups
are more likely to lobby politicians when enforceabilityof contract is high under the centralized policymaking
system.
We find no systematic evidence that decentralized interest groups are more likely to lobby politicians than centralized interests. This is consistent with our Hypothesis
2 that under the mixed SMD/PR system, the effectivenessof the decentralized punishment mechanism via voting
or endorsing a candidate in SM districts declines, andthe effectiveness of the centralized punishment via campaign contribution or mobilizing/withdrawing PR party
votes increases. Indeed, the effects of decentralized versus centralized structure diminish after the electoral reform. Figure 1 presents the frequency of contacts with
politicians before and after the reform for the 144 groups
that were consistently surveyed for the second and thirdsurvey. Centralized groups have increased their contact
scores substantially by 63%, while decentralized groups
moderately increased their contact scores by 18%, which
confirms H2 and H3.

Who Contacts Bureaucrats?
Table 7 presents results on the frequency of interest groups’ contacts with bureaucrats using the same

TABLE 6

Ordered Logit Estimates of theFrequency of Lobbying with
Bureaucrats
1980

Organizational Structures
Local Org
0.548
(1.32)No Tokyo HQOrganizational Resources
0.053
ln membership(1.00)
Current MP−0.358(1.07)
Policy Tribes−0.013(0.59)
Advisory Council
0.679(2.18)∗∗
Retirement−0.623(1.26)
Group Age
0.043
(3.10)∗∗∗
Sectors and Issues
Subsidy
0.697(1.84)∗
Regulation
0.347(2.84)∗∗∗
Agriculture
0.890(1.49)
Labor
0.543(1.30)
SM-sized Industry −0.686(1.36)
International
cut 1
cut 2
cut 3
Observations

0.937(0.746)2.634(0.761)4.662(0.809)
184

1994

2003

0.125
(0.33)−37.663(0.00)−0.487(1.14)−37.111(0.00)

0.034(0.59)−0.124(0.34)−0.020(3.46)∗∗∗
1.509(4.46)∗∗∗−0.052(0.14)
0.007(0.76)

0.170(2.63)∗∗∗
0.244(0.57)−0.001(0.07)
0.734(2.00)∗∗
0.873(2.02)∗∗
0.013(1.28)−0.059(0.16)
0.260(1.86)∗−0.641(1.13)−0.804(1.79)∗

0.773(1.59)
0.222(1.44)−0.302(0.64)−0.770(0.92)−0.344(0.50)−0.811(−.767)0.932(0.763)2.366(0.781)173

0.259(0.46)
1.108(0.827)2.368(0.842)4.032(0.894)134

Absolute value of z statistics in parentheses.
∗
significant at 10%; ∗∗ significant at 5%; ∗∗∗ significant at 1%.
No Tokyo HQ is dropped from the model (1) due to collinearity.

covariates as our analysis on contacts with politicians.
Overall, the organizational structures of interest groups
have systematic effects on their relative decisions tolobby bureaucrats over politicians, but they do not have

887

WHO LOBBIES WHOM?

TABLE 7

Relative Allocation of Lobbying
Efforts to Legislators (%)
1994

2003

2.995
(3.07)∗∗∗
0.000(0.00)

1.471(1.19)
9.292(3.15)∗∗∗

0.328(2.39)∗∗−0.021(1.55)−0.018(0.02)
1.267(1.61)
1.381(1.53)
0.058(2.61)∗∗∗

0.145(0.80)−0.015(0.55)−2.007(1.61)−0.265(0.24)
1.537(1.20)
0.058(1.96)∗−0.395(0.43)−0.259(0.76)−3.754(2.78)∗∗∗−1.117(1.07)
2.015(1.22)−11.309(6.10)∗∗∗
163
0.22

0.431
(0.32)−0.603(1.38)
0.884(0.62)−2.741(1.20)−0.474(0.30)−7.228(3.13)∗∗∗
124
0.15

Organizational Structures
Local Org
No Tokyo HQOrganizational Resources
ln membership
Policy Tribes
Current MPs
Advisory Council
Retirement
Group Age
Sectors and Issues
Subsidy
Regulation
Agriculture
Labor
International
Constant
Observations
R-squared

Absolute value of t statistics in parentheses.
∗
significant at 10%; ∗∗ significant at 5%; ∗∗∗ significant at 1%
Ln Y = Ln (Y/(1 − Y)) when 0 < Y < 1. Ln Y = Ln(0.00001/(1 −0.00001)) when Y = 0; Ln Y = Ln(0.99999/(1 − 0.99999)) whenY = 1.

systematic effects on their intensity of lobbying with bureaucrats. This is consistent with our expectation that theorganizational structures of interest groups should matter
mostly to their decisions to lobby politicians because they
provide interest groups with monitoring and punishment
mechanisms when the commitment fails. There is noequivalent punishment mechanism interest groups canuse for bureaucrats such as withdrawing campaign con-tribution or votes. 24 One exception, however, is the ageof the group. During the first survey, the older organizations were more likely to go to a bureaucrat, which isconsistent with Muramatsu’s argument that older organizations have more institutionalized relationships withbureaucracy (Muramatsu et al. 1986, 73; Muramatsu andKrauss 1987, 522). The effect of Group Age, however, diminishes after 1980.
The Advisory Council membership and degrees towhich a given organization is regulated (“regulation index”) have significant positive effects on their decisions
to lobby bureaucrats, as expected. Whether an organizedinterest offers a retirement position (Amakudari) for bureaucrats has no systematic effects for the first two surveys, but has positive effects on groups’ decision to lobby
bureaucrats during the 2003 the survey. This is due tothe fact that fewer numbers of retirement positions became available under Prime Minister Koizumi’s reform,
and this has increased the value of the reward for bureaucrats. These results are particularly interesting in regard
to the conventional wisdom on the retirement positions(amakudari) that sees it as a means by which interest
groups hold agencies hostage to favorable treatment inregulation (Amyx 2004; Schaede 1994). Our findings indicate that its impact on lobbying decisions of interest
groups may be less than originally thought when such
positions were abundant in the 1980s and 1990s.

Other Findings: Organizational Resources
A few alternative hypotheses find expected support. Organized interests that have more political resources—suchas the larger membership size and having a member ofparliament as their member—are more likely to workthrough a political route than a bureaucratic route. The
longer a given group has been around, the more likelythat they contact politicians, confirming the importanceof the long time-horizon in increasing the enforceabilityof contract.
The number of policy tribe politicians has no systematic effects on groups’ decisions to lobby politiciansand has weak, negative effects on their decisions tolobby bureaucrats for the second survey, which is unexpected. A possible explanation for this is that policy tribe
politicians were not institutionalized during the 1980
24
One possible punishment for bureaucrats is not to grant a retirement position (“Amakudari”) for retirees from a particular bureau.
A then-midlevel bureaucrat in an economic ministry said he had
to be very careful not to alienate any of the key interest groups inan electronic industry for fear of damaging his chances for a good
retirement position, which was years ahead. The author asked, “Areyou really worried about that now?” and the reply was, “We all are”
(Interview conducted by one of the authors).

888

MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSSFIGURE 1

Pre- vs. Post-Reform Changes in Mean Contact Scoreswith Legislators(144 Groups that were consistently surveyed in 1994 and 2003)

survey; they then developed into mediators who alignorganized interests with bureaucratic, sectoral interestsby the 1994 survey, but had lost their mission after theelectoral reform due to the centralization of power to thePrime Minister and the Cabinet (Krauss 2007; Muramatsu
2005a,2005b,2005c).25 In sum, organizational resources
do affect interest groups’ decision to lobby politicians, but
the effect is weak and inconsistent across the surveys.

Control Variables
A majority of control variables turn out to have no systematic effects. For instance, the nature of contacts with policy
makers—i.e., whether an interest group receives subsidy
or does not—has systematic effects on the groups’ choice
to lobby politicians. Degrees to which the state intervenes
with interest group activity via regulation do have systematic, negative effects on their decision to lobby politicians, which is expected. Control variables for sectors
also show interesting results. Agricultural organizations
are less likely to contact politicians, particularly for the
25
To lend support to this interpretation, whether the organization
has policy tribe politicians or has a local organization are substitutive (i.e., negative correlation coefficients at −0.17) before theelectoral reform. Organized interests lobbied either through a localorganization or policy tribe politicians, but not both. This relationship has changed after the reform—these two variables positively
correlate at 0.08.

1994 survey, and these results tend to hold even when
we analyze the proportion of total contacts devoted topoliticians relative to bureaucracy. The possible explanation for this might be that agricultural liberalization was
negotiated at the Uruguay Round in the early 1990s. A
series of trade talks at the multilateral negotiations may
have given the upper hand to bureaucracy over politicians(Davis 2003, 2004).
In sum, this article has identified the effect of major electoral reform in 1994 on the choice of lobbying
activities. The new electoral system decreased the effectiveness of the decentralized punishment mechanism
while it increased the effectiveness of mobilizing versus
withdrawing party votes for the centralized groups. The
other decentralized punishment mechanism, i.e., withdrawing campaign contributions for individual politicians, has become less effective due to the revision ofRegulation on Political Funds in 1994. These institutional
reforms changed the effectiveness of various monitoringand punishment mechanisms interest groups can use andconsequently their lobbying behavior.

Conclusion
The findings presented in this article suggest a reconsideration of the preference and resource-centeredWHO LOBBIES WHOM?

explanations of lobbying widely used in the literature.
We have demonstrated the importance of theorizing lobbying venue choice and intensity as a function of contract enforceability between interest groups and policy makers. The organizational characteristics of interest
groups—i.e., whether an interest group is decentralized
or centralized—substantially affect their choice to lobby
politicians or bureaucrats because they are associated withvarying abilities to monitor and enforce the contracts andpunish when they fail to deliver on promises.
Our contractual approach solves some of the major puzzles left in the literature on lobbying. Organizedinterests tend to lobby legislators who are sympathetic
to their policies and who have a long-term relationship,
because with repeated interactions and with a long timehorizon, it is easier to enforce contracts with them. The
low contract enforceability characterized by a decentralized policymaking environment—such as the one under the SNTV electoral system—deters intensive lobbying with politicians by organized interests, particularly
by groups characterized by centralized structures. These
groups lobby bureaucrats more extensively because theirorganizational structures do not allow them to enforce
contracts with legislators or punish them when they fail.
On the other hand, in a more party-centered, centralized
policymaking environment with high contract enforceability, interest groups lobby politicians more intensively
than under SNTV. In particular, we have demonstrated
that centralized groups have increased their contacts moresignificantly than decentralized groups.
Our findings echo an emerging literature on politicalmarket failure and how economic and political organizations develop to deal with such risk. While that literature focuses on the repeated play and reputation (Snyder
1992), the role of community network (Stokes 2005), andthe role of the media (Finan 2008) in making politicians
accountable to constituents, this article has proposed oneof the understudied aspects that affects organized interests’ ability to enforce the contract with policy makers: organizational structures. Our results suggest that electoral
systems and organizational structures of interest groups
can be a mirror image: electoral systems that foster representation of local interests are more likely to encourage
decentralization of organized interests, while those that
foster representation of broader constituents are more
likely to encourage centralization of groups. Our findings
reinforce the long-held view that interest group organization is shaped by the structure of political institutions(e.g., Golden 1986; Gourevitch and Shinn 2006; Iverson,
Cusack, and Soskice 2007). We have gone further to showthat interest groups’ lobbying strategies are shaped byelectoral systems.

889
Second, our findings also force us to reconsider aconventional wisdom in the literature on how different
electoral systems represent diffused versus organized interests. While a majoritarian system such as SMD is believed to represent diffused interests better than semiproportional (SNTV) or proportional representation systems(Bawn and Thies 2003; Rogowski and Kayser 2002), we
demonstrate that the centralization of policymaking andcandidate nomination process under a mixed electoral
system means high contract enforceability between politicians and organized interest. This high enforceability, inturn, intensifies organized interests’ lobbying activities
with legislators. In particular, centralized interest groups
without local organizations might gain a larger voice
under such centralized policymaking environment andcould overshadow the voice of diffused interests, such as
consumers and citizens. Our contractual approach sheds
a new light on this debate by showing that electoral systems do not simply shape the scope of interests legislatorsneed to target (i.e., narrow vs. broad—horizontal axis in
Table 1), but they also shape policymaking environment(i.e., centralized vs. decentralized—vertical axis in Table1). The policymaking environment substantially affects
contract enforceability between legislators and organizedinterests and hence their lobbying intensity and venue
choices.
The above finding has an important policy implication for reforming electoral and campaign financesystems. Because voting, candidate endorsement, andcampaign donations are the three major instruments ofcontract enforcement for interest groups, electoral reforms should be implemented with campaign financereform—e.g., when the electoral system is decentralized,
interest groups should be able to use a “localized” punishment mechanism which allows them to grant or withdraw
campaign finance to individual politicians as opposed toparties.
In concluding, we suggest a few promising directions
for future research. First, an apparent extension of thisstudy is to investigate how organizational structures ofpolitical parties interact with various structures of interest groups to shape their lobbying strategies. Second, it
will be fruitful to think how our findings on lobbying
speak to the literature on centralized versus decentralized
corruption and its relative efficiency. Ackerman (1999,
chap. 7) and Kang (2002) have both suggested that acentralization of the policymaking process can deter “inefficient” corruption. This debate has spurred questions
about whether fiscal and political decentralization leads
to bad governance and accountability (Treisman 2000).
Although this article did not concern the efficiency oflobbying per se, our findings imply the opposite that

890

MEGUMI NAOI AND ELLIS KRAUSS

decentralization might deter overall lobbying by discouraging organized interests to lobby politicians. How electoral systems and political or fiscal decentralization interact to shape representation of organized interests and thelevels of their political activities, including corruption,
would thus be a promising line of research. Relatedly, it
will be fruitful to investigate how the choices of lobbying
strategies are related to the success of lobbying. Finally,
general welfare and distributional implications of different lobbying strategies under various electoral systems
need to be discussed.

Appendix
A Note on Sampling Procedure
The sampling was done in two stages. The first stage was
extensive interviews with bureaucrats on which interest groups played important roles in policymaking andpolicy implementation in various ministries. The survey
team chose 112 interest groups based on these interviews.
The second stage was to list interest groups that were notmentioned by bureaucrats but who have played an important role in policymaking/implementation by searching
through newspaper archives, Diet testimony, and the Annual Report of Organized Groups in Japan (Nihon Dantai Nenkan) published every year. An additional 300 orso were chosen through this procedure, giving the totalof 450 groups as the universe of cases. They contacted
450 groups for the survey, and 252 groups agreed to be
surveyed. The second and third surveys replicated thisprocess in addition to keeping as much of the same interest groups that were surveyed during the first period andobtained 247 and 235 groups agreeing to be surveyed.
The sampling procedure described above may beproblematic if our question concerns which interest
groups are more influential than others as it explicitly
selects important and active interest groups. The procedure is less problematic for the purpose of our article
however, as we are interested in who lobbies politiciansversus bureaucrats when interest groups have a choice ininfluencing bureaucrats or politicians.

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