“Information and Contact-Making in Policy Networks: A Model with Evidence from the U.S. Health Policy Domain”

Theory: The political information that lobbyists seek is distributed in a communications network. Individual lobbyists must therefore choose their contacts carefully. We wed rational choice theory to network analysis in a combinatorial optimization model of lobbyists’ choice of contacts in a network. The model demonstrates the growing importance of political "friends" relative to acquaintances as contacts when the competition for information among groups rises. Hypotheses: Our model predicts that when the general demand for political information is low, a cocktail equilibrium prevails: lobbyists will invest their time in gaining “weak tie” political acquaintances rather than in gaining “strong tie” political friends (Granovetter 1973). As the demand for information rises, lobbyists follow a chum strategy, investing in strong ties. Method: We test these hypotheses in an analysis of inter-organizational contact making in U.S. health politics, using the data of Laumann and Knoke (1987), with OLS regressions of average group contacts across policy events and maximum likelihood count models of contacts across interest groups. Results: Both the events-level analysis and the group-level analysis show that as lobbyists’ demand for information rises, they make more strong ties. We also find that older organizations have more strong ties by virtue of reputation effects, but we find no evidence for the hypothesis that strong-tie investments are increasing in a group's fiscal resources. Note: Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1997. An earlier and different version of this paper was prepared for presentation at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 10-13, 1997. We thank John Brehm, Donal Green, Peter John, Jonathan Katz, Thomas Koenig, Ken Kollman, and Paul Teske for helpful comments on this earlier version. “Increasingly, it is through networks of people who regard each other as knowledgeable, or at least as needing to be answered, that public policy issues tend to be refined, evidence debated, and alternative options worked out – though rarely in any controlled, well-organized way.” -Heclo, “Issue Networks and the Executive Establishment,” (1978: 104) “More than mere technical experts, network people are policy activists who know each other through the issues. Those who emerge to positions of wider leadership... are experts in using experts, victuallers of knowledge in a world hungry for right decisions.” -Heclo (1978: 103) Students and practitioners of politics have long understood that policy information is distributed in networks. The settings may differ but the principle is invariant. In politics, what you know depends upon who you know, and how you are positioned. The intuitive kernel of Heclo’s (1978) often-cited argument is that information is embedded in networks. And an intrinsic quality of networks is that no single actor controls them. Networks are not designed, but are the concatenation of myriad rational decisions as to whether to talk or not to talk, to acquaint or not to acquaint (e.g., Verbrugge 1977, Padgett and Ansell 1993). Without a theory of how these individual decisions are made, one may conclude with Heclo that contemporary lobbying is disorderly, unpredictable and increasingly outside of democratic control. As a first step toward more general systematic theory of policy lobbying networks, we analyze how organized groups allocate their time and resources establishing contacts in a policy communication network. Lobbyists spend more time with some of their peers, less time with others. Allocation of time among contacts is an important facet of the lobbyist’s job, because it helps determine what and how much she knows about policy issues of the day. Lobbyists find that access to policy information is critical; for example, lobbyists may get “access” to policymakers by virtue of their demonstrated ability to convey credible and useful information to Congress or the bureaucracy (Hansen 1991, Milbrath 1963, Bauer et al. 1972, Heclo 1978). In this paper we analyze the social acquisition of information in policy networks. In order