Maraam Dwidar, Ph.D.
md1921@georgetown.edu
Assistant Professor
Georgetown University
About Me:
Maraam Dwidar is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on American national institutions and public policy, with emphases on organized interests and collective action, intersectional advocacy, and agency rulemaking. Dr. Dwidar's book, Power to the Partner: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy, documents how social and economic justice organizations strategically build coalitions to compensate for inequalities in the American lobbying landscape and evaluates the structures and characteristics of successful coalition work. Her research has been published in journals including the American Political Science Review, the Policy Studies Journal, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. Dr. Dwidar holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Government from The University of Texas at Austin and received undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Statistics from the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown, she served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
Research Interests
Public Policy
Political Parties and Interest Groups
Bureaucracy
Intersectionality
Countries of Interest
United States
Publications:
Journal Articles:
American Indians are among the most underrepresented, yet heavily regulated, groups in national politics. While Indian nations maintain statuses as sovereign governments, they, and their people, remain affected by national policies addressing their treaty, land, resource, and civil and political rights. Theories of American Indian political incorporation suggest that Indian nations thus deploy interest group tactics to maintain or achieve favorable policy outcomes. We argue that coalition building, a ubiquitous lobbying strategy, enhances tribal policy advocacy and that “Native-dominant” coalitions—those in which Native interests constitute a majority of members—are more influential than their non-Native-dominant counterparts. We test these claims using data from administrative rulemaking and find support for our hypotheses. We conclude that the unique particularities of tribal advocacy distinguish Native coalitions from those of other groups, and that their strategic lobbying choices may help to mediate representational disparities in policymaking by the executive branch.
Many studies have identified a line of influence between interest group lobbying and the federal bureaucracy’s implementation of public policy. These works, however, have often focused on the influence of individual groups rather than coalitional efforts, which compose the majority of lobbying. Assessing this activity is critical to understanding the role of public participants in administrative policymaking. I test the influence of diverse coalitions of interest groups on bureaucratic policy outputs by analyzing a new dataset of organizations’ co-signed public comments across nearly 350 federal agency rules proposed between 2005 and 2015. I find that agencies favor recommendations from organizationally diverse coalitions, and not coalitions that are bipartisan or dominated by business interests. Further, I find that coalition influence is heightened when lobbying in coalitions that are larger in size and more well-resourced, and when policy salience is low. I conclude that diverse lobbying coalitions help bureaucrats to shape the direction and content of regulatory law. This conclusion further establishes the role of organizational participants in bureaucratic policymaking and contributes to the debate over democratic legitimacy in the administrative state.
Interest groups representing the marginalized regularly neglect advocacy on behalf of their most vulnerable constituents—those with intersectional disadvantage. Yet, they claim that such advocacy is central to their missions. I argue that interest groups representing women, people of color, Native nations, and the poor strategically conduct intersectional advocacy through coalitional lobbying. I test this claim using a new dataset of cosignature patterns within public comments on proposed federal agency rules submitted by a set of such groups between 2004 and 2014. I find that these groups are significantly more likely to pursue intersectional advocacy in coalitions but that coalition work, alone, does not relate to influential intersectional advocacy. Rather, it is particular coalition characteristics, including organizational diversity and financial capacity, that predict such influence. I conclude that collaborative lobbying is an effective tactic for mediating representational bias in interest group advocacy and promoting more pluralistic administrative policy making.