Interest Group Influence on Managerial Priorities in Public Organizations
Sean Nicholson-Crotty
[email protected]
And
Jill Nicholson-Crotty
[email protected]
Department of Political Science
Texas A&M University
4348 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843-4348
Paper prepared for presentation at the biannual meeting of the Public Management
Research Association, October 9-11, Washington, DC.
1
Introduction
The recognition that public bureaucracies are political entities that make
important policy choices, as well as depend on political support for their legitimacy, has
spawned a large body of research on the interaction between these organizations and
interest groups. Though normative conclusions concerning the amount of power wielded
by groups and the potential consequences of such interactions vary dramatically (See
Lowi 1969; Chase and Reveal 1983; Meier 2000), most authors conclude that interest
groups exercise a non-trivial degree of influence over decision-making in public
organizations.
Despite the longstanding interest among scholars regarding interest group
influence in public administration, however, there are surprisingly few empirical studies
that test for the degree of such influence in large N analyses of multiple public
organizations. The studies that do exist have typically investigated public managers’
perceptions of group influence, or focused on bureaucratic outputs, rather than modeling
actual managerial decisions. Additionally, there are few studies that ask not only “do
interest groups have influence over public managerial decision making,” but rather,
“under what conditions should we expect interest group influence to be greater or
lesser?” The highly inconsistent findings regarding group influence over legislative
decision making suggests that this second question is probably more appropriate.
In order to address these issues, this essay will test for interest group influence on
the decisions of over 500 public managers. More specifically, we will examine the degree
to which groups influence the priorities that managers set for their organizations.
Drawing upon insights from the broader interest group literature, as well as the
2
scholarship on public management, we will also outline two conditions under which the
influence enjoyed by interest groups over managerial goals should be greatest.
Specifically, we suggest that interest group influence is greatest when access to the
managerial decision-maker is greatest and when the group is perceived by the manager to
be more powerful than other actors in the organization’s environment.
Interest Groups and Public Organizations in the Literature
Political scientists and public administration scholars have wavered significantly
over the years regarding both the degree of influence that they believed interest groups
exercised over public organizations and the potential consequences of that influence for
democratic governance. This section will review that literature, not in an attempt to settle
this long-running debate, but rather to lay the foundation for more specific expectations
about the conditions that may moderate such influence.
One of the earliest and most widely recognized bodies of work on the relationship
between interest groups and public agencies dealt with the supposed “capture” of
regulatory bodies by the groups that they were charged with regulating. Bernstein (1955)
presented one of the most influential formulations of this interest group dominance
theory. He suggested that the regulatory agency faces diffuse interests that favor
regulation and intense and concentrated interests that oppose it. Soon after an agency is
created, he contended, the diffuse “public” loses interest, while the regulated interest
remains vigilant, causing the regulatory agency to gradually adopt a favorable position
towards their most powerful constituent. Numerous other studies also identified “iron
triangles” or subsystems, where a powerful interest group controlled the actions of a
3
public agency through the manipulation of the relevant congressional committee (See
Maass 1951; Lowi 1969; Truman 1955).
Despite its one-time dominance, by the late 1970s “capture theory” was under
serious attack. Scholars began to find evidence of numerous agencies that were not
dominated by the group that they were charged with regulating (Anderson 1981;
Katzman 1980). Interestingly, however, many such studies were not arguing that no
interest group had influence over decision making in these agencies, but rather that a
different group was being represented. Rather than business interests, research
demonstrated that consumer advocacy and public interest groups were influencing agency
agenda setting activities and acting as deterrents to agency capture (Gormley et al 1983;
Sabatier 1975; Keiser 1980). Thus, these studies suggested that interest groups could
influence decisions made by public managers even in the presence of a powerful
opposing interest.
The literature from public management and administration tends to provide
similar insights regarding interest group influence, and scholars in this area often view
interaction with clients and constituents as a desirable and necessary condition of
successful management (See Chase and Reveal 1983; Doig and Hardgrove 1987). As an
exception to this generally positive tone, Viteritti (1983; 1986) suggests that clients may
suffer if the most politically powerful interest groups faced by an agency represent a
different group of citizens. Regardless of the beneficiaries, however, his work on urban
education organizations demonstrates the powerful influence that interest groups have
over public decision-makers.
4
Much of the remaining discussion of interest group influence is found in the
literature that compares public and private organizations and management. This literature
concludes that interest groups have substantial potential influence on public managers
because of the openness of public organizations to the external environment. Fottler
(1981) suggests that public organizations have a “primary environmental dependency” on
interest groups and other external political actors, which allows them to influence all
manner of managerial activity, including planning, organizing, motivating, and
controlling. Similarly, Ring and Perry (1985) conclude that interest groups and their
agendas can act as “procedural constraints” on the strategies available to public
managers.1
As noted above, many of these studies, both from political science and public
management have been either theoretical or case based in their approach. There have,
however, been several studies that attempted to systematically investigate interest group
influence across numerous agencies. Marrissa Golden (1998) reviews 11 rules
promulgated by 3 federal agencies and concludes that the comments of interested parties,
particularly business-oriented groups that choose to participate more actively, influence
administrative rulemaking. Balla and Wright (2001) study over 100 appointments to the
National Drinking Water Advisory Council and determine that interest group
recommendations have a significant impact on the success of candidates. Finally, two
studies examine the perceptions of interest group influence among large samples of
public administrators. Brudney and Hebert (1987) and Abney and Lauth (1986) find that
public managers perceive interest groups to be an important source of information and
1
For a review of the diverse set of external interests faced by public managers, see Rainey et al (1976) and
Perry and Rainey (1988).
5
influence, though in both cases groups were not perceived to be as influential as other
political actors (e.g. legislatures and executives).
Despite the fact that they do not focus directly on managerial decisions, these
studies suggest that interest groups can influence public managers. Thus, we offer the
expectation that:
Hypothesis 1: In the average case, the presence of a powerful interest group will
correlate with managerial decisions and goals that reflect those of that group.
Conditions that Moderate Interest Group Influence on Public Managers
Despite the evidence that interest group may often affect the decisions made by
public managers and public organizations, we should be cautious in assuming either
universal or uniform influence over any political actor. While there are a number of
potential moderators of such influence, we will focus on two that seem to enjoy the
broadest support in the literature. This section will argue that the level of access that an
interest group has to decision makers and the perceived power of the interest group vis-àvis other external actors helps to determine the amount of influence that group has on
managerial decisions.
Initially, we can note that there is some precedence in the literature for
considering access and power as moderators of influence. Culhane (1981) argues that the
amount of access enjoyed by industry groups and public lands administrators, as well as a
group’s power (measured as resources), both interact with group influence in order to
determine bureaucratic outputs regarding public lands use.
Despite the instructive nature of Culhane’s analysis, however, we believe that
there are several reasons to further examine the relationship between power, access, and
6
influence. First, Culhane’s measure of access includes not only contacts, but also
“participation dominance” in certain publicly sponsored events, as well as indicators of
administrative discretion. Thus, there is no clear test in these models of the impact of
access, as traditionally conceived of, on interest group influence.2 Second, the measures
of power discussed above include only absolute power as indicated by resources. They do
not capture either the relative power of a group vis-à-vis other competitors in the
organizational environment or the administrative decision-makers perceptions of a given
group’s power and importance. We believe that both of these may be more important
than resources in determining the degree to which group power moderates influence. And
finally, the analyses discussed above model bureaucratic outputs, rather than individual
managerial decisions or priorities, which are the primary focus of this study.
Thus, it seems productive to further develop the ideas of power and access and
their impact on influence over managerial decisions and we can draw on a variety of
literatures to do so. Though full of contentious and sometimes contradictory findings, the
scholarship on interest groups in legislatures tends to agree that access to decision makers
is both a coveted resource and a necessary condition for influence (See Baumgartner and
Leech 1998 for a review). As but one example, Hansen (1991) argues that findings
concerning the differential influence of farm groups throughout this century are best
explained by the amount of access that these groups had to legislators and the types of
legislators ( i.e. opponents or supporters) that granted such access.3
2
In addition, we can note that interest group influence is never actually in Culhane’s models independently.
Thus, his analysis can tell us that influence and access interact, but it cannot tell us the degree to which
access moderates influence.
3
Hansen argues that access declined during the post-war period because of the precipitous decrease in the
farming population and thus the perceived power of farm related interest groups.
7
In addition to the insights drawn from studies of interest group influence in the
legislature, there is also evidence concerning the importance of access that relates
specifically to public agencies. Harvey (1994) argues that the waxing and waning
fortunes of environmental groups during the early part of the Echo Park controversy were
closely tied to the access that they, through their allies at the Park Service, had to the
head of the Department of the Interior.4
In addition to these instructive cases, there is some broad based empirical
evidence regarding the importance of access. Abney and Lauth’s (1986) study of urban
administrators demonstrates a fairly strong correlation between interest group access and
perceived influence over departmental decisions. They also identify routes of access to
public managers that include direct contact with departments and indirect contact through
city councils and chief executives. The findings suggest that direct access has the
strongest and most consistently significant correlation with perceived influence across
different types of agencies. They also indicate that most groups attempt to expand their
influence by utilizing multiple access points.
Thus, though focusing on perceptions of influence rather than actual decisions,
Abney and Lauth’s study confirms the insights in the case based research cited above
regarding the importance of access. These studies lead us to the expectation that:
Hypothesis 2: Influence over the priorities of public managers will be moderated
by the degree of access that an interest group has to the decision maker.
The second condition that the literature suggests should moderate the influence of
interest groups is their perceived power relative to other groups. Because of the open
4
In the Echo Park case, environmental groups were eventually able to press their case even without formal
access by expanding the scope of the conflict through the media.
8
nature of public organizations, managers typically face pressures from a diverse set of
interests (Rainey 1997; Lynn 1996). Though ideally administrative decisions would be
able to appease everyone, this is rarely possible. Thus, the prescriptive literature on
managerial effectiveness suggests that it often behooves a manager to ally him or herself
with the most powerful or well organized group in the organization’s environment. Chase
and Reveal (1983) argue that strong interest groups and their leaders can not only bring a
high degree of community support and legitimacy for managerial decisions, but may also
provide a more established, and thus “responsible,” partner for the manager to work with.
Lynn (1990) also suggests that executives have an incentive to ally themselves with the
most powerful interest group. Specifically, he notes that in highly pluralistic
environments, such as human service delivery, strong interests can act as a buffer for the
manager against opposition from other interest groups, as well as elected officials.
In addition to these prescriptions, there is some empirical evidence that powerful
interests have greater influence over bureaucratic outputs and perceived influence relative
to their weaker competitors. Studies suggest that recognized groups with unambiguous
policy objectives are more successful in influencing agency appointments to advisory
committees (Balla and Wright 2001). Similarly, Brudney and Hebert (1987) suggest that
state agencies view interest groups as more potentially influential when they demonstrate
the legitimate power to shift agency priorities.
Though there are myriad ways to measure the potential power of an interest
group, the ultimate influence that the group enjoys over administrative decisions will be a
function of their perceived power in the eyes of the manager. In other words, the extent to
9
which the manager believes that personal or organizational success is tied to the support
of a particular group. Thus we expect that:
Hypothesis 3: Influence over managerial decisions and goals will be moderated
by the extent to which a manager perceives an interest group to be more powerful
than other political actors in the organization’s environment.
Data and Methods
We test our assertions in an analysis of public education organizations, which
have increasingly been recognized in recent years as a fruitful place to study managerial
behavior. Education in the United States is typically conducted in special-purpose
governments managed by an appointed superintendent. These provide a good place to
study interest group influence on managerial decision making for a variety of reasons.
First, school districts are designed to buffer the educational process from the influence of
other governmental actors and, thus, managers are not formally required to interact with
interest groups (Tyack 1974; Meier and O’Toole 2001). Nonetheless, the environment
surrounding education organizations is highly pluralistic and often highly contentious,
with multiple interests attempting to influence policy. Additionally, the modern realities
of delivering educational services, as well as staying employed, often requires that
superintendents take the demands of these groups seriously.
The education literature suggests that parents are one of the most significant
interest groups in the environment of education organizations.5 Specifically, it argues that
5
Viteritti (1990) makes an important distinction between an agency’s clients and interest groups that seek
to influence decisions and argues that the two should be conceptually distinct. In this case, however, well
educated parents can be considered both the representatives of a portion of the clientele and an interested
party pushing for changes that may be detrimental to the remaining clients.
10
well educated parents of a certain socio-economic status often exercise significant
influence over school district decisions due to both their political resources and their
desire and willingness to participate in school governance (Schneider et al. 1997). Most
importantly for this study, the literature also suggests that these parents tend to strongly
favor one organizational goal for the schools that their children attend. That goal is
college preparation. Parents who have attended college, or earned advanced degrees,
expect that their children will do the same and they expect superintendents to structure
school districts in such a way as to prepare their children to compete in that environment
(Ma 2001; Jencks et al. 1979).
Thus, the first hypothesis outlined above would suggest that parents may be able
to influence the decisions of superintendents and, thus, that the presence of a significant
number of well educated parents should correlate with managerial priorities that
emphasize college preparation. Hypotheses 2 and 3 would also suggest, however, that the
degree of this influence should be moderated by the characteristics of the relationship
between a district’s top manager and the parents in that district. Specifically, we expect
that well educated parents will be more successful in shifting the district’s focus to
college preparation when they have greater access to the superintendent and when they
are perceived as powerful relative to other actors in the state and local environment.
To test these more specific expectations, we draw data from a subset of districts in
Texas in 2002. Texas districts constitute over 7 % of the national total and encompass
enormous variation on a host of indicators. Information on managerial goals, perceptions,
and behaviors was gathered via questionnaires sent to all district superintendents in 2002.
Follow up calls were used gather information from nonrespondents, resulting in a total
11
response rate of 51%.4 Respondents and nonrespondents did not differ significantly on
criteria such as total enrollment, district wealth, workforce experience or turnover, or
other characteristics. The data for the remaining variables were gathered from the Texas
Education Agency and the National Center for Education Statistics.
Dependent Variable. Defining influence and deciding where it should be
expected is perhaps the most contentious issue in the study of interest groups (See Smith
1995). Most studies of interest groups and public organizations have modeled influence
on bureaucratic outcomes (Ball and Wright 2001; Golden 1998) or managerial
perceptions of influence (Brudney and Hebert 1987), rather than actual managerial
decisions. These operational choices are probably a response to the difficulty of obtaining
data on the decisions of multiple managers or the recognition that such decisions are
highly constrained and, thus, may not accurately reflect the importance of interest groups
in the decision-making process.
While recognizing the constrained nature of decision making in public
organizations, we wanted to find a measure that would get us closer to the decisions of
individual managers than those employed in previous studies. In order to do so we
gathered data on managerial priorities by asking superintendents about their “primary
goal for improving the district.” We argue that these goals reflect the choices that the
superintendent would make if he or she had complete autonomy and discretion. At the
very least, we are confident that the measure represents the amount of attention that the
4
The number of usable responses on certain questions differed slightly, due to the fact that a small
number superintendents did not provide usable responses on the interaction or perceived power measures
the models below report Ns of 600 and 589 respectively.
12
manager is paying to a given issue and, thus, the power of interest groups to influence the
managerial agenda.
Respondents were asked to rank order choices from among six goals common to
school districts, including college preparation, performance on the state standardized
exam, bilingual education, athletics, vocational education, and extracurricular activities.
The measure employed in the following analysis reflects the importance that
superintendents ascribed to college preparation. The variable ranges from 1 to 6 and
coded so that 6 indicates the greatest emphasis on improving college preparation relative
to other goals.
Independent Variables. The following analyses include three primary
independent variables. The first is the percent of parents within a district with a college
education or above. According to the first hypothesis, this measure should be positively
correlated with the importance placed on college preparation by the superintendent. The
variable is collected by the National Center for Education Statistics and has a mean of
15.19 % and a standard deviation of 8.31%.
The second key independent variable in this study is meant to capture the access
that interest groups, in this case parents, have to the manager. We do not expect this
variable to have a direct impact on managerial goals, but rather to interact with and
moderate the influence enjoyed by parent groups. In order to measure access we ask
superintendents if they interacted with parent groups and the frequency of those
interactions. They were given choices of “daily,” “more than once a week,” weekly,”
“monthly,” “yearly,” or “never.” The measure employed in subsequent models has been
coded to range from 0 to 5, with higher values connoting more interaction.
13
The final variable of interest is power, or more precisely, managers’ perceptions
of the power of parent groups relative to others in the organizational environment. In
order to measure perceived power, we ask superintendents to rank order the groups or
principles that “play the most significant role in determining policies that affect your
district.” Choices included “pedagogical expertise,” “responsiveness to parental demands
and concerns,” “the school board,” “the Texas Education Agency,” “lowering
costs/increasing efficiency,” “maintaining equivalency with other districts,” and “the
teachers’ association.” Our measure reflects the rank that superintendents assigned to
parents. It has been coded to range from 0 to 6 with higher values indicating greater
perceived power for that group to determine district policies.
Control Variables. The analyses presented below control for a variety of factors
that might influence managerial goals. The first of these captures the “need” for a
managerial focus on college preparation. If a superintendent oversees a district where a
large number of students fail to qualify for college based on SAT scores, then he or she
might be inclined to focus on their preparation, regardless of the wishes of parents. Poor
performance in this area might be even more strongly correlated with the desire to
improve in a district where parents care deeply about this goal. Either way, performance
on this measure should be negatively associated with the dependent variable. In order to
control for the impact of need, we include a measure of the percent of student that receive
an 1100 or better on the entrance exam, which the state of Texas terms “college
qualifiers.”
The next two control variables are intended to capture the presence of pressures
that might pull the district manager towards other goals beside college preparation. All
14
models include a measure of the percent of district students that are classified as English
Language Learners (ELL), which captures the need for the superintendent to emphasize
the alternative district goal of bilingual education. We also include a measure of
performance on the state’s standardized exam, which is the percent of students within the
district that pass all parts of the exam. This measure simultaneously captures the “need”
to improve on an alternative goal, as well as potential pressure from another powerful
actor in the organization’s environment. In Texas, the Education Agency rates school
districts on their performance on the TAAS exam, publicly ranks them based on those
scores, and sanctions poor performers. Districts that are performing poorly on this exam
will likely face pressures that make it difficult to focus on a higher order goal such as
college preparation.
The final two controls are designed to capture the characteristics of the
organizational environment that might make it easier for a manager to focus on college
preparation as a primary goal. First, we include an index of dissimilarity.6 Higher values
on the index indicate more heterogeneous populations. We also include a measure of total
enrollment. Based on the assumption that superintendents should be more able to focus
on one higher order goal, such as college preparation, with a relatively small and
homogenous group of clients, both of these measures should negatively correlate with the
dependent variable.
Methods. Because of the ordinal dependent variable and the cross-sectional
nature of our data, all models presented below were estimated as ordered logistic
regressions. Diagnostic tests indicate that levels of heteroskedacticity are sufficiently
6
The index is calculated as 1 -
Â(p
2
) where p is the proportion of each racial or ethnic group.
15
high to bias standard errors, so all models report z-scores calculated with the
Huber/White/sandwich estimator of variance.
Findings and Discussion
Table 1 presents the findings from the first analysis of managerial goals regarding
college preparation in Texas school districts. Column 1 contains coefficients and z-scores
from a simple additive model testing for the influence of educated parents on managers.
Column 2 presents the average change in the predicted probability of moving from one
rank to the next across the range of the independent variable. In other words, it shows the
likelihood that a superintendent will rank college preparation as the number 2 rather than
the number 3 priority for the district if the district went from having the lowest to the
highest percentage of educated parents.
[TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]
We can begin the discussion of the first model with an examination of the control
variables. First, we can note the negative and significant coefficient on the measure of
total enrollment. This implies that managers of larger organizations are less likely to
emphasize higher order goals, such as college preparation, perhaps due to the fact that
they are forced to accommodate so many alternative organizational goals. The index of
dissimilarly is also negatively associated with the dependent variable, but it fails to reach
traditional levels of statistical significance. We expected performance on the state’s high
stakes exam to be positively associated with emphasis on college preparation, based on
the assumption that districts that were doing poorly on this exam would face pressure
from the state education agency. The positive and significant coefficient on the measure
16
indicates that this is the case, perhaps suggesting that managers are only able to focus on
college preparation once they successfully accomplish more basic goals.
Finally, we can turn to the variable of interest in the first model. The coefficient
for the measure of educated parents within a district is positive and significant, indicating
that a larger concentration of this interested group correlates with managers who place a
greater emphasis on preparing students for college. The change in the predicted
probability across the range of the independent variable is .15. This finding provides
some support for the first hypothesis concerning the influence of interest groups on
managerial decisions, or in this case, priorities. It confirms in a large-N setting, the
insights from a good deal of literature, which asserts that interest groups have influence
on managers of public organizations. The finding also demonstrates, however, that such
influence may not be overwhelmingly large.
Table 2 presents the findings from the interactive model of managerial goal
setting and tests for the moderating effect of access and perceived power on interest
group influence. As in the first table, a column of predicted probabilities is presented next
to the coefficients. Again, the control variables performed largely as expected, but in the
interest of brevity, we will limit the discussion here to the variables of interest.
[TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]
Here the findings become very intriguing. Initially, we can note that, once the
model includes controls for access and perceived power, the measure of educated parents
becomes insignificant, though it remains in an expectedly positive direction. In the
interactive model, this term can be interpreted as the impact of parents when both access
and perceived power are equal to 0. This indicates that, when there is no interaction
17
between the manager and interest groups and when the manager perceives these groups to
be the least powerful of environmental actors, those groups do not have a discernable
influence over managerial goals.
Turning to the interactions, the measure combining access and percent educated
parents is positive and significant, suggesting that well educated parents can have
influence on superintendent priorities as the frequency of interaction with the district’s
top manager increases. The figure in Column 2 indicates that, across the range of the
access measure, the probability of ranking college preparation one category higher
changes by an average of .23, when all other variables are held at their mean. The
interaction of educated parents and perceived power is also positive and significant,
indicating that influence increases (and becomes statistically distinguishable from 0)
when superintendents consider parents to be a powerful actor in the environment. The
predicted probability shows a .28 change across the range of the variable.
Conclusion
We began this essay with two questions concerning the influence that interest
groups have over managerial decision making in public organizations and the conditions
under which we might expect that influence to be greater or lesser. The findings from the
analyses presented above provide some interesting answers to these questions and invite a
set of distinct but interrelated conclusions. Additionally, they invite a brief discussion of
a question that we did not ask. Namely, is the influence that groups have substantial
enough to warrant the attention that the subject has received and the concern that it has
spawned in certain circles?
18
The first set of conclusions that we offer relates to the study of interest groups and
public organizations. Specifically, the results from our analyses suggest that models of
interest group influence that do not control for moderating factors may be underspecified.
Additionally, they may lead researchers to overestimate the influence of these groups
across multiple organizational settings. Remember that the interest group measure was
statistically significant until the analysis controlled for the interactions between interest
groups and access and interest groups and power, at which point it dropped below
traditional levels of statistical significance. These findings suggest that interest groups
may not enjoy any appreciable influence on managerial decisions unless other necessary
conditions are met, and that students of interest group influence on public organizations
should take this into account.
Our second set of conclusions is more concerned with the democratic nature of
bureaucratic decision making generally and the practical ability of interested parties to
influence bureaucratic decisions more specifically. The positive normative literature on
bureaucracy suggests that this “fourth branch of government” may be the most
representative of all the branches due to the inclusion of minority groups and the
openness of such agencies to external interests (Meier 2000; Herring 1936; Long 1948).7
Our findings suggest that interest groups who wish to exercise this type of democratic
influence through bureaucratic decision making must emphasize certain strategies in
order to be successful. First, they must ensure that they have access to the relevant public
manager and that they are able to interact with him or her on a regular basis in order to
make their case. Alternatively, the findings provide more evidence that political
7
As noted above, the negative normative literature has a very different stance on the consequences of the
very open nature of bureaucratic systems.
19
principals who wish to increase the influence that certain groups have over policy in the
implementation process should “stack the deck” in order to increase the formal access
that these groups have to administrators. Finally, the findings also suggest that, if groups
are unable to obtain access, they may be able to increase influence by positioning
themselves as powerful players in the agency’s environment. This might be accomplished
through well-publicized relationships with key political principals or through high profile
victories on certain policies that affect the agency.
Our final conclusion concerns the answer to a question that we did not ask at the
outset of this research regarding the substantive importance of interest group influence.
The findings herein suggest that the impact of interested parties in the organization’s
environment is substantive, but by no means overwhelming. The results presented in the
second table indicate that a one-category shift in the amount of access that a group has
translates to approximately a .038 change in the likelihood of the manager changing his
or her priorities. The size of the impact is slightly higher for perceived power. These are
reasonably large impacts considering all of the things that public managers must take into
account when setting priorities for their organizations, and they suggest that energy spent
by interested parties trying to influence managerial decision making is not wasted. The
size of these impacts do not suggest, however, that interest groups, even those with a high
degree of access and perceived power, are a magic bullet governing managerial priorities.
Instead, the findings indicate to us that interest groups should be a part of any study of
managerial decision-making, but that they should be considered as but one of the myriad
influences on the managers of public organizations.
20
Table 1: Determinants of Superintendents’ Organizational Priorities
Independent Variables
Educated Parents
Coefficients
D in Predicted Probabilities
.025
(2.21)
.15
College Qualifiers
-.008
(1.37)
---
High Stakes Exam Pass Rate
.042
(2.81)
.12
Percent English Language Learners
.013
(0.77)
---
-11.407
(0.80)
---
.000
(2.44)
.18
Dissimilarity Index
Enrollment
N = 600
Wald c 2 = 24.32 (p>.0005)
Pseudo R2 = .16
Numbers in parentheses are z-scores calculated with robust standard errors
21
Table 2: Determinants of Superintendents’ Organizational Priorities, Interactive
Model
Independent Variables
Educated Parents
Coefficients
D in Predicted Probabilities
.018
(0.59)
---
Parent Group Access
.421
(1.12)
---
Educated Parents X Access
.015
(1.90)
.23
Parent Group Power
-.221
(1.72)
.08
Educated Parents X Power
.014
(1.97)
.28
College Qualifiers
-.007
(1.20)
---
High Stakes Exam Pass Rate
.043
(2.84)
.12
Percent English Language Learners
.010
(0.65)
---
Dissimilarity Index
-8.353
(0.56)
---
Enrollment
.000
(1.91)
.14
N = 589
Wald c 2 = 36.62 (p>.0001)
Pseudo R2 = .21
Numbers in parentheses are z-scores calculated with robust standard errors
22
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