Coalition Building

Coalition building occurs when groups with a common interest in a particular policy outcome will cooperate with each other to work for its advancement. A coalition involves organizations electing to work together with the specific intent of influencing a particular public policy decision. It is well established by now that coalitions play an important—often decisive—role in determining the effectiveness of an advocacy strategy. Over the years, several political scientists have conducted large-scale surveys of the activities that U.S. lobbyists report undertaking. These surveys universally suggest that participation in lobbying coalitions appears to be very common—the proportion of lobbyists surveyed who stated that they took part in coalitions is generally well over 90%.

Coalitions tend most often to be ad hoc or temporary arrangements. Typically, a coalition is formed to work around one specific policy issue;once that issue has been resolved by policymakers, the coalition will dissolve. Indeed, some political scientists have described Washington lobbying as an infinite pattern of whirlpools: Groups come together to form one set of whirlpools on all sides of a policy issue, and when it is concluded, the groups break up and then re-form in different configurations to create a new set of whirlpools dealing with a different issue. In large part, this is due to the relatively fractured state of American government, in which no political party can always direct the policy agenda. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, a government with a large majority in Parliament can more or less guarantee to pass its legislation. The fact that U.S. congressional and White House politics ensures that power is more diffuse and constantly shifting makes it inevitable that interest groups have to work in coalitions in order to be successful. The relatively weak party system in Congress, for instance, means that lobbying coalitions can be highly effective at creating voting majorities on any given issue by drawing on cross-party support in the House and Senate.

Groups commonly find that they need to work on one issue with another organization but that they will be opposing that organization on another issue. In [Page 359]Washington, it is said that groups can have no permanent allies and no permanent adversaries, merely permanent interests which require any group to cooperate with any other group that shares its position on a particular policy goal while acknowledging that they continue to differ on separate policy objectives. To take one practical example of the diverse range of organizations that may form a coalition, we could consider a proposal to increase the regulation of beer. Such a proposal could face opposition from a coalition of all the various interests involved in that single industry: farmers (who grow hops, wheat, and barley), breweries (from global brands to micro-producers), labor unions (representing workers in the industry), bottle and can manufacturers, beer wholesalers and distributors (and their employees), retailers (bars, clubs, hotels, restaurants, liquor stores, and groceries), and consumers (represented by groups such as the 300,000-strong Beer Drinkers of America).

As that example illustrates, the partners in a coalition may well have varying reasons for supporting the same ultimate policy objective. As long as the end goal is shared, however, they can set aside their other differences to work cooperatively on that issue. Coalition partners very often decide to work together on a policy issue precisely because each partner brings to the united effort a very particular resource, for example, information, membership, money, access to an influential legislator, and so on. In a coalition, organizations that may well be competitors on other issues choose to set aside those differences in order to maximize their joint impact on public policy by exchanging their individual resources to mutual benefit.

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