Efforts to influence public policy occur in several forums in national politics. Along with congressional testimony and amicus filings, which we examined in Chapter 3, advocacy groups assess or monitor congressional behavior by selecting major issues the groups deem important, and rating members of Congress on their voting on the issues selected. These ratings are often called congressional scorecards and are used to both inform constituencies about and pressure members of Congress regarding the level of support a member gives to each groups’ agenda. They allow groups to publicize the behavior of those members who agree or disagree with their positions, and ratings often serve as proxies for support of groups’ interests in studies that seek to explain why members behave as they do. We use the ratings in a different way in this chapter to extend our analysis of black-Latino advocacy group relations.

Instead of the overall “rating” for each member, which is usually the item of interest in advocacy group ratings, our interest in this chapter is the policy and legislative issues from which groups derive their ratings. The contents of the ratings provide useful information for describing the issues of concern to minority advocacy groups, their positions on those issues, and from these, the degree to which cooperation, conflict, or nonconflict/independent behavior mark black-Latino relations. The analysis will examine the issues identified as salient (because of their inclusion on scorecards) as well as the policy positions of minority advocacy organizations in terms of the preferred vote (yes or no) on each issue. We thus address two basic questions: (a) what votes (or types of votes) in Congress are deemed most important, and (b) what is the degree of congruence or overlap of the votes identified in scorecards of black and Latino advocacy groups? This allows us to examine advocacy group behavior in terms of groups’ efforts to affect the congressional arena through the identification of policy issues, and further address the central questions of this study: what is the nature of black-Latino intergroup relations as they occur in national politics?