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This week, we’re studying how interest groups work.
First, despite what you see on TV, interest groups are not necessarily an evil thing. The First Amendment guarantees our right to free speech, and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” which is essentially a Constitutional right to form interest groups and work collectively to influence public policy.
I’m biased on this one. I love teaching, but I spent a career as a lobbyist for the Houston Apartment Association, a non-profit trade association that represents people who develop, own and manage apartment properties. Mostly, I do what my clients don’t have time to do – read all the city council agendas each week, go to meetings, keep track of what’s being discussed and help explain the unintended consequences of things being considered. Persuading somebody to vote a certain way is a very rare part of the job, and is generally done by people actually in the industry, not lobbyists.
At the federal level, though, things are changing. The amount of money required to win a congressional campaign is becoming enormous, and the extent to which congressmen rely on interest groups for campaign funding makes many citizens justifiably nervous.
Find the website for the Center for Responsive Politics: https://www.opensecrets.org/
Links to an external site.
Explore around a little, then find your way to the “Interest Groups” page
Links to an external site. under “Influence & Lobbying.” Click on “Interest Groups List,”then search by sector. Find an industry that interests you – one in which you work or hope to work someday.
Write a 2 – 5 page essay about that group’s campaign contributions. How much do they give? To whom? Why do you think they chose those recipients? (Hint: Go to https://www.congress.gov/
Links to an external site. and look at their committee assignments) What do you think they have to gain from doing this? What do they have to lose if they don’t? If you were involved with this group, would you push for them to do anything differently?
Submit in Word. Cite your sources.
ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS
Assignments – Unless the directions say otherwise, assignments are college-level essays, 2 – 5 pages, double-spaced with sources cited. Use a normal-looking, normal-size font (never bigger than 12) and normal margins.
“College-level” is the key. It doesn’t have to be stuffy or super-formal, but if u rite lik ur txting ur bff, i c u gtng n F :>)
Proofread.
Write your assignment in Word (the file name should end in .docx) and save it where you can find it on your computer. My suggestion: make a folder in My Documents, call it something like “Govt2305” and save all your assignments there so they’re easy to find.
Follow the directions and submit these in Canvas.
Sources and Plagiarism – Cite every source you use on every assignment. I don’t need perfect APA citations
Links to an external site. (although that’s a great thing to learn), but make it clear where you got your information and be specific every time. Regarding plagiarism: Just don’t, ok?. Every semester, I end up busting a few students for copying text from the internet into a Word document and calling it their essay. Once means a zero for that assignment. Twice is an automatic F for the course.
NEW: Having artificial intelligence (AI) write your essay is cheating. If you have ChatGPT, Grammarly, WordTune or any other AI generator write your essay, that’s cheating. Important note: If you sketch out a rough draft yourself and have one of these AI models re-write it, that’s still cheating. Learning to write well on your own is part of what you’re learning here at HCC. Turnitin has a good AI detector and it’s getting better all the time, so just don’t. Write your own essays in your own words. If you need help checking spelling and basic grammar, Microsoft Word has spellcheck. If you need more help with writing, HCC provides that in-person or virtually. Information here: https://iied21.hccs.edu/forms/allTutoring/index.ht…