Most scholarly accounts of interest groups and lobbying have focused on how organizational factors and resources influence lobbying decisions and choices of tactics. I start from the premise that political factors also have a crucial influence. I assume that the architecture of the American political system also governs interest group actions. Therefore, to dissect the specific strategies and tactics lobbyists adopt in dealing with Congress, we must first identify what factors actually influence congressional elections and congressional decisions.

In the first part of this chapter, I take advantage of what scholars have learned about elections and legislative decision making to understand how and why grass roots strategies are used in lobbying campaigns. I argue that grass roots lobbying is an effective tool for interest groups to provide – in the way most likely to bias the process in their favor – the information required by voters when they decide for whom to cast a ballot and for legislators when they decide how to proceed on a particular piece of legislation.