State-Level Disability Rights: An Interest Group Perspective (2012)

Undergraduate: Mary Kroeger

Faculty Advisor: Sarah Treul
Department: Political Science

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In the US, social rights interest groups and their interactions with state legislators comprise one channel through which advocates work to alter policy outcomes. I argue that differences in the number of state-level social rights interest groups explain a portion of the variability of state-level disability rights law. Extant literature about the rights of people with disabilities does not have up-to-date measures of overall strength of disability rights legislation within each state nor examination of the associations between the population level characteristics of the interest group community and legislation. My study seeks to fill these gaps by using OLS regression to characterize the relationship between the number of social rights interest groups in a state and the comprehensiveness of the state’s disability rights law, while controlling for other relevant variables (Gross State Product, partisanship, total number of interest groups). I hypothesized that when a state has weak disability rights laws, groups may form as an alternative form of representation; over time, the pressure that the rights groups exert on the legislative body may motivate alterations in the laws. My models showed a negatively-correlated relationship between the number of social rights interest groups and the stringency of disability rights legislation. This finding supports my hypothesis that an environment with a set of weak disability rights laws fosters greater interest group strength.