A dynamic model of member participation in interest groups

We know a great deal about how and why interest groups form, including why individuals choose to give their time and resources to political organizations, but we know very little about their participation in these organizations after they join. There is some evidence in the literature that member participation rates decline over time, when they participate at all, but it has not been carefully studied or explained. In this article, I use prospect theory, a type of bounded rationality theory, to argue that the experiences members gain in their group from participation give them a sense of their importance to the organization’s survival, and that most members come to believe that they are not as important as they may have once thought, or been led to believe, when they joined. They become more interested in using their time and energy in pursuits other than working with their interest group, and thus their participation declines over time. External threats to the interest group, such as attacks from other interest groups or government elites, may boost member participation, but only temporarily. In addition, members who joined more for private material benefits that they cannot get outside of the group, rather than to pursue their political passions, are not likely to participate much at all, not even at the beginning. Finally, as an interest group grows and matures, sub-groups with somewhat different interests form in the membership. This lack of interest homogeneity means the group’s leaders may start prioritizing some member interests over others or be perceived as not serving any sub-group interest, either of which might cause a decline in participation. Indeed, as a group grows, its leaders have to develop more institutionalized, top-down means of communication and member management practices just to keep the organization functioning; however, consistent with Robert Michel’s iron law of oligarchy, this has the side-effect of alienating members and, consequently, contributing to a fall-off in participation. Even the group’s founding members, who are presumably most invested in it, become disillusioned over time. Hypotheses developed from these propositions are tested with data on a single interest group, Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, which lobbies for charter schooling in the District of Columbia. I attended 5 years of biweekly meetings and gathered additional data on every member charter school. I then use this data to test a dynamic model of changes in rates of member participation in the organization over a period of several years. The results largely confirm my expectations of a general decline in member participation over time and how that can be reversed or exacerbated by factors such as external threats and the division of the membership into sub-groups. I conclude with some thoughts on future research and what these findings mean for interest group representation.