Population ecology and niche seeking in the development of gay and lesbian rights groups

Abstract

This paper explores the formation of groups within the framework of the population ecology literature. Specifically, I argue that newly formed groups’ target membership bases and policy agendas will become more focused as the density of interest groups in a population increases, though groups will not necessarily continue this focused trend once the density of the population has reached its upper limits. To test this theory, I utilize Nownes’ [Nownes, A. J. (2004). The population ecology of interest group formation: Mobilizing for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, 1950–1998. British Journal of Political Science, 34, 49–67] dataset on the population ecology of gay and lesbian rights groups and a typology of groups that Bosso [Bosso, C. J. (2005). Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas] used in explaining the focus of environmental rights groups. I find that as the population of gay and lesbian groups became more dense, the groups that formed tended to narrow down their potential membership populations. However, the results were different for a newly formed group's policy agenda. While niche seeking occurred during the rapid growth of groups in the 1970s and the early 1980s, groups that formed after growth leveled off in the mid-1980s balanced their agendas between being too broad and too narrow. This important finding indicates that niche seeking does not always occur in very dense interest populations.

Acknowledgements

I thank Virginia Gray for comments on an earlier draft, Anthony Nownes for the dataset used in this article, and Alixandra B. Yanus.

Notes

1 Information on five of the groups could not be tracked down, so the dataset used here contains 93 cases. More information about the data, including the original selection of cases, can be found at http://web.utk.edu/~anownes/research.htm. Importantly, groups focusing solely, or in large part, on the issue of AIDS were not counted in this data. However, this does not preclude the effect of more attention being paid to gay and lesbian rights issues, as the population of interest groups continued to expand until 1984, a full three years of development after the AIDS issue broke in 1981.

2 An additional coder was used on a random half-sample of the data. An alpha score of .81 is obtained when the original coding scheme is compared to the coding scheme with the additional coder's changes. However, utilizing all changes made by the additional coder did not substantively affect the results. Therefore, the results from the original coding scheme are displayed.

3 This model could have been predicted as a multinomial logit model. However, by presenting the models as three separate logit models, I am able to predict why a group formed as a sectoral player rather than as either a niche seeker or keystone group, which is easier to explain than the reasoning behind the significance of a variable that helps to discern between a keystone group and a niche seeker. In other words, the three logit models are more interpretable than a multinomial logit model for the purposes of this study.

4 Two variables from the Nownes’ (2004) models were not included: number of Congressional hearings on homosexual issues and the percentage of Democrats in Congress. The number of Congressional hearings was excluded as it was not clear how or why entrepreneurs would change a newly formed group's mission or target population based on whether Congress is discussing issues related to gay and lesbian rights. The percentage of Democrats in Congress was excluded since the Democrats of the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s contained many politicians who were conservative and Southern, thus seemingly less likely to support homosexual rights than liberal Northern Republicans. However, the situation is reversed by the 1990s, rendering the variable somewhat suspect.

5 The negative finding for the density-squared control, along with the positive finding for density, follows the results from Nownes It indicates that new groups focus on narrow target populations as density increases up to a point, then decreases with further increases in density (see Nownes, 2004). This corresponds to the 1984–1998 period, when newly formed groups did not necessarily target their messages to a narrow subgroup within the gay and lesbian population.

6 As noted earlier, during the period from 1984–1998, 13 out of the 23 groups that formed had a broad population target. However, when the two earlier time periods are taken into account, the trend is generally toward predicting a narrower target population.

7 This is not indicative of a resurgence in groups forming with niche seeking agendas during a period of high density. Only two of the seven groups formed during the Clinton years had niche seeking policy agendas.