Dissertation Defense: Henry Watson
Candidate: Henry Watson
Major: Government
Advisor: R. Kent Weaver, Ph.D.
Knowledge Suppliers: Interest Groups and Local Affordable Housing Policy
How do local governments make policy choices? This dissertation advances the theory that elected officials make choices based on a pool of knowledge shaped by the local interest group environment for the relevant policy subsystem. This provides an avenue for influence for local interest groups, who use credibility and knowledge as political resources. I analyze the role of interest groups in producing local affordable housing policy to empirically test this theory. Using IRS data on nonprofit organizations, I quantify the strength of six housing interest group categories across 128 cities from 1995 to 2022. I also use a combination of clustering and latent variable methods to describe local affordable housing policy mixes across the same sample. My results show an association between local housing interest group environments and the latent traits of local affordable housing policy mixes. I also analyze data from 31 semi-structured interviews with policymakers and stakeholders in the city of Washington, D.C. to provide evidence for knowledge as an important mechanism by which interest groups influence local policy choices. This dissertation demonstrates the importance of interest groups to local politics and reveals knowledge as a critical political resource.