Abstract:
Higher education institutions and interest groups have public policy priorities, including
appropriations (Li, 2017) and other regulatory policy (Natow, 2017). Institutions often hire
professionals known as lobbyists to help achieve their policy objectives. These lobbyists serve
in a variety of roles, both on campus and at the capital. The extant literature on these in-house
higher education lobbyists is often dated (e.g., King, 1975) or focused on the backgrounds (e.g.,
Ferrin, 2003) or tactics and strategies (e.g., Ferrin, 2005) of those lobbyists. Very little is known
about the experiences of in-house higher education lobbyists as to how they experience their
work or the roles they play. To address this gap, I explored the experiences of 10 in-house
higher education lobbyists working for public, four-year institutions located within a single
Midwestern state through semi-structured interviews. To conduct my analysis, I used the
Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis approach of Smith, Flowers, and Larkin (2009). The
findings of this study suggest that the experiences of in-house higher education lobbyists are
influenced greatly by context and shaped by four central factors: (a) the roles and tasks of the
lobbyist, (b) the self, (c) the campus, and (d) the capital.
