To lobby alone or in a flock: Foraging behavior among organized interests

At present, we have little theory accounting for variations in alliance behavior among interest organizations. To address this problem, we extract three hypotheses about social hunting from foraging theory, as developed in behavioral ecology. The foraging theory hypotheses about resource competition, resource distribution, and individual sources of variation in alliance activity are tested with data on interest organizations in the American states. We report preliminary support for several foraging theory hypotheses and discuss how they might be more rigorously tested in future research.