Vital Statistics on Interest Groups and Lobbying

Holly Brasher received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, and her research focuses on interest groups and lobbying and the U.S. Congress. She has published in the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Communication, and American Politics Research. Dr. Brasher has written articles on political parties, public opinion and party leadership in Congress, and campaigns and issues. She is most recently the author of “Understanding the Influence of Lobbying in the U.S. Congress: Preferences, Networks, Money, and Bills,” with Jason Britt in New Directions in Interest Group Politics, edited by Matt Grossmann (Routledge, 2013). She is also the author with David Lowery of Organized Interests and American Democracy (reprinted by Waveland Press, 2011). She was the Principal Investigator of “Using Computer and Information Sciences to Understand Organizational Engagement,” NSF 1127911 from August 2011 to January 2013, an interdisciplinary project that was a collaboration of political scientists and computer science faculty to quantitatively analyze lobbying in Washington, D.C. She is also the author of a blog on lobbying at LobbyingDisclosure.org. Dr. Brasher has served as visiting faculty member at Duke University and George Washington University and tenured faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.