User:User45678910/Grassroots lobbying

Social media
The trend of the past decade has been the use of social media outlets to reach people across the globe. Social media advocates are by nature grassroots organizers. They provide a way for communities to only to interact, but to form around topics. Implementing social media tactics in grassroots lobbying provides a platform for broad outreach and allows activists to not only inform but interact with various people about their cause.

Some advocates are now using social media to reduce the cost of traditional campaigns, and to more precisely target public officials with political messages.

An example of the success of social media as a tool of grassroots lobbying is in the Black Lives Matter movement. Social media created platforms for broad discourse that allowed for the information sharing of both policy issues and solutions as well as mobilization. In interviews conducted by Mundt and Ross, social media administrators for BLM groups emphasized the importance of promoting action plans for members on social media to achieve concrete results. These action plans include grassroots lobbying in the form of directly contacting legislators about policy reform.

Trends
Trends from the past decade in grassroots lobbying have been the increase in aggressive recruiting of volunteers and starting campaigns early on, way before the legislature must make a decision. Also, with increasing technology and modern communication techniques, lobbying groups have been able to create interactive web pages to email, recruit volunteers, assign them to tasks and keep the goal of the lobbying group on the right track. With the added devices of today such as Facebook and Twitter, Grassroots lobbyists have an even easier, cheaper, and faster way to reach the masses and develop a strong base for their issues to be heard.

However, trends in grassroots lobbying in the digital age could weaken the success of interest groups. An experiment completed by John Cluverius, published in Political Research Quarterly, found that due to the ease and inexpensive nature of emails, legislatures are now untrusting of mass lobbying efforts. Cluverius found that astroturfing and the grassroots movement efforts of interest groups have a negative effect on legislators percepton of issue salience because their inauthenticity provides no information about constituencies. The research finds that interest groups have more success utilizing grassroots mobilization to influence campaigns and elections rather than policy matter. Concerns about the efficacy of grassroots lobbying were existent before the digital age as well. Legislator are subject to a diverse group of influences, weakening any potential impact of grassroots organization. Fowler and Shaiko found that members of Congress are partial to the stances of their party within their constituency while also balancing policy disputes on focal issues. Their study of the influence of environmentalists on Senate voting found that the general opinion of the lobbyists did not influence the members of Congress, it was their personal partisanship in addition to their policy position that had the most influence. Representatives favored lobbyists within their coalition which hurt the environmentalists in the study who were attempting to appeal to republican Congressmen without being in the party themselves.

Hot topics for lobbyists

The major concerns of the general public do not reflect those of the lobbying groups. This is why the lobbying groups feel that they must use the aforementioned tactics to sway the public a certain way on an issue that they may never knew existed. To the general public, crime is the number one problem in the nation, followed by the state of the economy and international affairs. However, the main concern for lobbying groups in the past has been on health concerns. A study done in 2009 shows that over 20 percent of lobbying groups put health concerns such as disease prevention, Medicare, or prescription drugs as a top priority. This interest in health is followed closely by environmental concerns as well. Although grassroots lobbying has changed the stage of such advocacy, it is still concerning the same issues as other more traditional or direct lobbying.

Grassroots lobbyists typically differ from traditional lobbyists in their funding as well as their ideological goals. Typical lobbying is done on behalf of a corporation with the intentions of swaying legislation in their favor for economic gain. A study by JAMA Internal Medicine found that from 1999-2018 the pharmaceutical and health product industry spent the most money on lobbying and campaign contributions in the US, totaling $4.7 billion. Personal medical expenditures in the US, the costs of perscription drugs, and the efficiency of Medicare remain prominent policy issues. Congress passed a 2019 repeal of taxes in relation to the Affordable Care Act which benefits medical device manufacturers and health insurance companies. While grassroots organizations are concerned about issues like health and medical policy in the US, it is typically from a disadvantages stance.For example, Patients Against Affordable Drugs is an independent organization that promotes the mobilization of Americans against monopoly pricing of pharmaceutical products. Unlike traditional corporations who have the funding to directly influence legislators through campaign donations and partisan financing, interest groups are often nonprofit and rely on outreach efforts to successfully influence policy decisions. Debra Salazar at Western Washington University completed a study comparing mainstream environmental interest groups vs grassroots groups in Washington. The study found that the institutionalized groups were more concerned with political tactics and bureaucratic practices whereas grassroots organizations were primarily concerned with mobilization resources. The study also found that the grassroots groups receive less external funding and reliance on member sponsorship discourages the conservation actions of the group. In grassroots organizations, member participation is the most important factor to achieve outreach goals and to promote conservation in this environmental example.