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Interest Group Politics and Economic Growth in the U.S. States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Virginia Gray  and
David Lowery
Virginia Gray
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
David Lowery
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Abstract

Mancur Olson's model of economic growth has attracted great attention as a theoretical account of how interest groups influence the rate of economic growth over time. Moreover, the model appears to have received strong empirical support in Olson's tests employing U.S. state data. However, the specification of the Olson construct in these tests is insufficiently attentive to the complex causal chain implicit in Olson's argument, inadequately accounts for precisely how interest groups matter, and employs a static research design that obfuscates the cause-and-effect relationships posited by the model. We review these issues and develop a more complete specification of the Olson model. The respecified model is then tested using U.S. state data for the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s using new measures of interest-group influence.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 109 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1988

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