Scholarship on interest groups and lobbying has become bifurcated between the dominant micro-level research on the choices of individual groups and macro-level research on group-level populations, especially the work of Gray and Lowery, with almost no integration of the two. Failure to integrate levels of analysis, unfortunately, will impede future progress in the subfield. I discuss some of the challenges to integrating research at multiple levels and then propose a solution which I test by re-analyzing two of my micro-level research projects now combined with Gray and Lowery’ macro-level density variable using hierarchical modeling. It turns out that grouping micro-level observations by group interest niches matters in the statistical analysis, though the effects of varying group population density are more subtle.
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