ABSTRACT
Interest groups have long been viewed as an integral part of the congressional and bureaucratic policymaking processes but have only recently been recognized as significant actors in presidential stages of the policy process as well. Since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the conduct of relations between presidents and interest groups has been transformed. Once the province of party leaders and agency officials, interest-group liaison has now been brought into the presidency with responsibility given to members of the White House and Executive Office staffs. In this way, presidents have ensured that they can be more attentive to the programmatic needs and demands of organized interests and can also enlist groups as members of their electoral and governing coalitions. Starting with FDR, staff assistants developed increasingly well-defined responsibilities for interest-group liaison until a separate staff unit for public liaison (Office of Public Liaison) emerged during the Ford administration to take its position next to the congressional relations and the press offices as specialized links to outside constituencies. 1 Since Ford, each administration has maintained such an "outreach" capability for interest groups, although the status of the unit has varied. 2
The courtship has not been totally one-sided. Some groups, especially those who represent historically unorganized interests, turned to presidents because they had no place else to go with their problems. More established groups found that as policymaking increasingly came to be centralized in
the Executive Office of the President, the inability to influence presidential initiatives or to know the details of their gestation placed them at a disadvantage. It was advantageous, if not essential, to include the presidency on their list of targets to influence while continuing to pursue their traditional connections in Congress and the bureaucracy. Interest-group opportunities to exercise leverage over presidents also grew during the past four decades: social movements took advantage of national media coverage to dramatize their concerns, and important changes in the campaign finance laws enabled established interests to influence elections in new ways. 3
Just because the conduct of these relations has been changed, however, does not mean the relationships themselves have been transformed. As in the past, most analysts use an exchange framework to illustrate and analyze relations with interest groups, the same framework used to study interactions between presidents and other centers of power in the American political system.4 Nonetheless, some scholars have argued that there has been a qualitative change in the president's connections with interest groups. As Stephen Skowronek suggests, the "political universe" faced by twentiethcentury presidents "is in every way more fully organized and more densely inhabited" than it was previously.5 As a result, presidents needed to negotiate more actively with congressional committees and bureaucrats while "directly soliciting support from major client groups in the society at large."6 This macroperspective takes one beyond the day-to-day political exchanges that constitute the activity of interest-group relations to emphasize more fundamental implications for the larger political system.
