Mayflies and Old Bulls: Organization Persistence in State Interest Communities

Many conventional accounts of lobbying communities emphasize towering differences in political influence between for-profit and not-for-profit and public organizations and between institutions and membership groups or associations. A central cause of these differences in influence is said to be differences in the persistence of these types of groups in a lobbying system. We test this hypothesis by examining the short-term turnover of organized interests in state interest communities in the 1990s. While we find evidence of substantial year-to-year turnover in lobby registrations, we find little support for the conventional wisdom about the distribution of persistence among types of organizations. Contrary to expectations, institutions are markedly less persistent than membership groups and associations, and for-profit interests are no more persistent, on average, than not-for-profit interests.