Critical Coalitions

In the summer of 2022, Kansans for Constitutional Freedom (KCF), a bipartisan coalition of advocacy organizations, came together to fight a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed state lawmakers to ban abortion in Kansas. Despite insurmountable odds, KCF succeeded, and in the months that followed their victory, organizers across the country puzzled over how they managed to pull it off. In the words of Ashley All, KCF’s communications director, “Coalition building is absolutely critical. No matter where you live, whatever state you’re in—I don’t care if you’re in New York, California, Montana, or Kentucky—coalition building is critical. You’ve got to bring a lot of different voices to the table.”

And yet, while many ascribe to All’s sentiment—for instance, most advocacy happens in partnerships—there is little empirical evidence of whether, and how, coalition work lends itself to exceptional success. I set out in search of this evidence. I spent seven years speaking with political organizers, coalition leaders, and policy makers, all whilst observing and recording the behavior of more than 20,000 organizations and 1,700 coalitions advocating for social, racial, and economic justice in American politics.

My new book, Power to the Partners, is the culmination of that work, and its message is clear: Partnership is powerful, but only certain kinds of coalitions systematically enable successful advocacy outcomes: those that bring together member organizations with diverse backgrounds and specialties and with structural characteristics that encourage collective learning and adaptability.—Maraam A. Dwidar

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On the evening of August 2, 2022, Ashley All, an organizer with Kansans for Constitutional Freedom (KCF), was nervous. Kansas had become the first state in the nation to vote on abortion rights through referendum on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. On the ballot was a constitutional amendment allowing Kansas lawmakers to ban abortion—the first of many efforts to restrict reproductive rights in the post-Dobbs era. If passed, the amendment would open the door to a near or total ban on abortion in the state. Republican lawmakers had led a campaign based on misdirection: they drafted confusing ballot language, refused to say what policies they would enact if the amendment were passed, and strategically scheduled the vote on a day with historically low turnout. Organizers for KCF, a bipartisan coalition of roughly forty reproductive rights organizations and allied groups including Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Trust Women Foundation, and URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, had worked for months to combat their efforts. By election day, the coalition had spent over six million dollars—in a state won by Donald Trump by nearly fifteen points in 2020—and later that evening, triumphed in a landslide victory. All, a veteran political organizer, could scarcely believe it.

While the outcome of their work may have come as a shock, KCF’s tactics were tried-and-true. Across local, state, and national organizing, coalition work is ubiquitous. In 2018, a coalition of environmental justice groups and oil industry associations formed to oppose changes to an Environmental Protection Agency regulation affecting the sale of gasoline with 15 percent Ethanol (E15)—and successfully rescinded the rule. In 2020, a broad-based coalition of business groups, religious organizations, and Black Lives activists successfully lobbied Mississippi state lawmakers for the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from their state flag. And in 2023, a decades-long ban on awarding Pell Grants to incarcerated individuals was lifted by the US Congress—the result of years of advocacy by a coalition of social and economic justice organizations led by the Vera Institute of Justice. This book is about what makes coalition work by these kinds of advocates succeed. To understand why some coalitions triumph and others fall short, I spent seven years observing and recording the behavior of more than 1,700 coalitions advocating for social and economic justice in American national politics. I measured their differences—in membership, money, messaging, and goals—and compared those with successful outcomes to those that failed. In doing so, I tried to tease out the micro-and macro-level conditions surrounding organizations’ successful efforts collectively to shape public policy. Do coalitions succeed when they have deep pockets? When they have an opportunity, like the chance to capitalize on a moment or movement? Or maybe the ability to recruit just the right kinds of partners, with specialized skills and friends in high places?

All of these things matter. But most of all, what truly distinguishes successful coalitions is their ability to build partnerships with strong architectures and mobilize many different, crosscutting interests in pursuit of a shared ideal. These organizations, keenly aware of their competitors and constraints, use coalition work to compensate for individual shortcomings and progressively build movements. They partner with longtime allies and former opponents, strategically invest their resources, and make careful compromises. Some of these partnerships are long-standing and formal, like Voces Verdes (founded in 2009), a coalition of Latinx community organizations and businesses fighting for clean air, energy, and water policy. Others are more ad hoc and fleeting, like the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination, which united a fluctuating set of organizations to promote religious rights and liberties in a dozen advocacy initiatives beginning in the late 1990s. Regardless of their form, these coalitions are always united by a single goal: to produce meaningful change. This book focuses on their efforts to shape political institutions and public policy in pursuit of social and economic justice.

In the coming pages, I tell a story of how social and economic justice organizations strategically respond to their communities’ needs and their operational constraints with coalition work. Most of these advocates face day-to-day challenges: they have fewer members, smaller budgets, and more limited issue agendas than the private and professional interest groups of K Street. They are beholden to their patrons and paying members to keep the lights on and thus must respond to patron preferences, even if these run counter to that of the organization. So they turn to partnerships, old and new, to do the hard work of advocacy. In doing so, they face a natural tension. They worry about balancing their organizations’ autonomy and interests with investments in coalition work. To survive in a competitive political environment, they must protect their records and reputations as individual groups. But in a crowded arena, making friends is also vital. I argue that social and economic justice groups consciously thread this needle. They work strategically in coalitions when the benefits of partnership outweigh the costs. By investing in these partnerships, they advance more effective and more equitable advocacy. This book explains how.

Understanding Advocacy

Many historically marginalized communities in the United States struggle to gain political access, find the time to politically engage, or to garner the attention of their advocates in government (Brady, Verba, and Schlozman 1995). These long-standing dynamics have substantial consequences for representation. Lawmakers, for example, have few incentives to take up the concerns of communities with low rates of political participation (Mayhew 1974). More often than not, their work responds to the interests of wealthy Americans and big business—those who participate politically at high rates—disenfranchising millions in the process (Gilens 2004; Gilens and Page 2014). To put it simply: American government privileges the interests of those with the most advantage.

Social and economic justice organizations—interest groups seeking to influence government policymaking on behalf of historically marginalized communities—try to mediate this disparity (Martinez 2009; Phinney 2017; Pinderhughes 1995; Strolovitch 2007). Many of these groups have roots in protest movements that decry government shortcomings to social and political grievances, such as those for women’s rights and civil rights in the early and mid-twentieth century (Strolovitch 2007). The National American Woman Suffrage Organization (NAWSO), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), for example, all formed during critical moments in American history to mobilize their communities and lobby policymakers in support of suffrage and civil rights. Their efforts led to monumental policy changes, including the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the overturning of the “separate but equal” doctrine in US constitutional law (Gelbman 2021; Pinderhughes 1995).

In the second half of the twentieth century, over a thousand organizations were founded to advocate for vulnerable communities, such as UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza,), GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), and the Black Women’s Health Imperative (formerly the National Black Women’s Health Project) (Strolovitch 2007). Alongside their predecessors, their efforts led to historic policy achievements protecting and promoting the interests of marginalized communities, including the Equal Pay Act’s prohibition on sex-based wage discrimination in 1963, the establishment of social welfare programs supporting poor Americans in 1964 and 1965, and the passage of labor protections through the Age Discrimination and Employment Act of 1967 (McConnaughy 2013; Skocpol 1992).

Organizations like the NAACP, LULAC, GLAAD, and their compatriots share a common factor: they developed in response to moments of social reckoning and deepening needs for better representation of their communities. These organizations remain one of the very few sources of political representation for vulnerable groups in American society (Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012). They take many forms, including citizen groups, labor unions, legal advocates, nonprofit service providers, and think tanks (Baumgartner et al. 2009a; Schlozman and Tierney 1986). They engage in policy advocacy—lobbying— and serve their constituents at a grassroots level. They offer community services such as legal aid, share educational resources such as voting guides, and politically empower their constituents by encouraging them to make their voices heard—and helping ensure they do so. They are key advocates for their constituents in public policymaking and service.

But they face an uphill battle. Despite their role as “compensatory representatives,” many organizational advocates for vulnerable communities have limitations. While their constituents’ needs are boundless, these organizations’ time and resources are not. They must often balance different motivations, such as a much-needed win, with the countervailing interests of different constituent groups. Some constituents have “easier” needs, or interests that align more closely with dominant groups and shifting political winds. Other constituents require advocacy that noisily disrupts the status quo and fights against stigmatized policy images and frames. The outcome is a tale as old as time: their advocacy successes are fleeting and mainly promote the interests of their more advantaged constituents while neglecting those with intersecting disadvantage (Brower 2024; English 2019, 2020; Marchetti 2014; Strolovitch 2007).

Compensating by Collaborating

Organizations consciously respond to these disparities and biases. They are aware of their many constraints and turn to specific tools to compensate for them. Collaborating—which I also refer to as coalition building—is one of these tools, and the most common lobbying strategy in organizational politics (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Baumgartner et al. 2009a; Hula 1999). While effective, it is also complex, and groups do not deploy it lightly. Information about potential partners—such as common interests, past successes, and reputation/stature—is paramount in the decision to work with others (Hojnacki 1997, 1998).

This intricate relationship has led to a small but growing body of research about coalitional advocacy. Scholars of organizational coalitions largely fall into two camps. The first argues that coalitions are unlikely, since organized interests require autonomy to survive and coalition building presents inherent risks to autonomy (Wilson 1973; Berry 1977; Browne 1990). The second contends that coalitions are advantageous because they allow groups to enhance their effectiveness in a crowded political environment (Salisbury 1990; Hojnacki 1997). Regardless, organizational coalitions do form—and often. Hula (1999), for example, reports that groups with policy-oriented goals regularly join coalitions in order to reduce expenditures, shape policy proposals, and define issue debates. Others do so to obtain insider information or to publicly demonstrate allyship (Hula 1999). The broader policy environment, of course, also plays a role. When opponents in a policy debate are strong, organizations derive greater benefits from lobbying in a coalition and are thus more likely to join one (Hojnacki 1997). Coalitions are most likely to break when differences in ideology, priorities, or lobbying style among partners collide (Staggenborg 1986; Levi and Murphy 2006).

Research findings on the outcomes of coalition building are more mixed. Heinz et al. (1993), Gray and Lowery (1998), Mahoney and Baumgartner (2004), and Haider-Markel (2006), for instance, find either no connection or an inverse relationship between coalition building and policy outcomes. McKay and Yackee (2007), Baumgartner et al. (2009a), Nelson and Yackee (2012), Phinney (2017), and Lorenz (2019), on the other hand, observe positive relationships between collaborative lobbying and policy influence and note that certain characteristics—such as coalition size and group consensus—can magnify the impact of coalition work. I argue that coalition work provides unique and significant benefits to social and economic justice organizations. These groups are widely known to have limited resources relative to their mainstream counterparts. Only a small proportion—fewer than 30 percent—retain a legal staff. Only 25 percent employ lobbyists, and a mere 20 percent have political action committees (PACs). In contrast, among mainstream interest groups, 50 percent retain a legal staff, 54 percent employ lobbyists, and 60 percent have PACs (Strolovitch 2007). These characteristics and differences tell a story of limited tactical, social, and financial capacity among organizational advocates for vulnerable communities.

Collaborating helps these organizations compensate, whether for limited resources, a lack of political credibility, or constrained advocacy agendas. When social and economic justice organizations build coalitions, they carefully balance their organizational priorities and strategically promote more effective advocacy and more equitable policy ideas. Their successes mean that policy choices made by political institutions account for the interests of marginalized communities—offering a semblance of hope for democratic legitimacy.