Which Interest Groups Affect Policy Making in Texas?

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I tried to provide enough detail that you could write a longer, or a shorter essay.

I want to make a couple important points first.

1. Your professor has probably given you material to read that pertains to this assignment--maybe a reading on interest groups, or political culture? I suggest you incorporate this material into your essay, along with lessons from the lectures, as this is usually expected. Professors (and those who grade for them) usually want to see that you're learning the lessons being taught in this specific course. For example, there are likely a number of theories as to what the political culture is like in Texas, and how it influences interest groups; if your professor has put forth a particular theory, then you'll want to use that in your paper (it should be more important than the theories I found and used.)

2. How you structure an essay or paper is the key to a strong assignment--you want your ideas to flow logically and clearly. Write an outline before you begin. It seems to me that the important part of this assignment is explaining the ties between political culture, and the influence of certain interest groups, so I spent most of my time on that. The other two sections (describing the most and least influential groups) are pretty straight forward so I provided less detail.

3. If you're writing a relatively short assignment: Then you may want to talk about less interest groups than the ones I mentioned, so you can talk about them in more depth. Just choose those that seem most important.

ORGANIZATION OF THE ASSIGNMENT

1. You could follow the order of the questions:

a. Discuss which interest groups have the greatest influence on Texas policy making.
b. Discuss which ones have the least influence.
c. Describe Texan political culture;
d. and how it explains the relative influence of interest groups.
e. It's not a bad idea to end with a sentence or two about the current state of policy making (Is this changing? Likely to stay this way for awhile? Etc.)

2. You could also...

a. Describe Texan political culture.
b. Discuss which interest groups have the most influence on policy making and why, given the political culture;
c. And then discuss which interest groups are less powerful and why, given the political cutlture.
d. End with a sentence or two about the current state of affairs.

For the sake of simplicity I'm going to follow the first outline, which follows how your assignment was set out.

1. INTEREST GROUPS WITH INFLUENCE ON POLICY MAKING

? Business and trade groups
Provide a fact or two to support this, and maybe an example depending how long this assignment is. Use Kraemer, there are a lot of ...