Search

Reformers assert that lobbyists take advantage of legislators who lack adequate staffing and research to win policy outcomes for their interest group clients. However, in the United States, legislators usually determine their own levels of staff. This paper exploits the 1990 passage of California's Proposition 140 to test a situation when the legislature's capacity dropped. Proposition 140 immediately lowered legislative expenditures for the 1991–1992 session by 38%, which decimated the policy staff, particularly in the state's Assembly. Using bill analyses that identify which outside groups served as the source of legislation, we shows that group sponsored bills became more likely to pass than non‐group bills in the wake of Proposition 140. This effect is concentrated in bills introduced in the Assembly. We account for other factors that could explain this relationship, particularly direct and indirect effects of the term limits wrought by Proposition 140, but find they did not alter legislator relationships with outside groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do interest groups target legislators to approach or lobby under strong presidentialism? This article explores two hypotheses. First, interest groups and lobbyists seek to access committee chairs with gatekeeping power, even in those jurisdictions where the executive holds (most) exclusivity to initiate legislation (Gatekeeping Hypothesis). Second, interest groups and lobbyists target legislators who introduce more bills on issues that concern them but only on policy areas outside the executive's exclusive sphere (Legislative Activity Hypothesis). We test these hypotheses with evidence from the Chilean Chamber of Deputies. We have coded and analysed 6479 lobbying audiences and over 2300 bills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lobbyists often target legislators who are aligned with them rather than opponents. The choice of whom to lobby affects both what information becomes available to legislators and how much influence special interest groups exert on policies. However, the conditions under which aligned legislators are targeted are not well understood. We investigate how the pressure to conclude policies quickly affects the strategic decision of whom to lobby. We derive conditions on the cost of delaying policies and on the distribution of legislators' preferences for lobbyists to prefer targeting allies. We show that the use of allied intermediaries has important implications for the duration of policymaking and the quality of policies. Counterintuitively, an increase in time pressure can increase the duration of policymaking and a longer duration does not always lead to better informed policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely thought that lobbyists exert influence over legislators' policy positions and, as a result, over policy outcomes. One mechanism of influence is the provision of policy expertise. Yet, there is little credible empirical evidence that lobbyists' expertise influences legislative outcomes. Across four experiments fielded with three lobbyists in two state legislatures that examine two public measures of legislators' positions, we find no evidence that lobbyists' expertise influences legislators' policy positions. We do find, in contrast, that the same policy expertise treatment is influential when provided by a legislative staffer. We conclude that policy information can influence legislators' positions, but that legislators are cautious when that information is provided by lobbyists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Former legislators who lobby exacerbate the effects of financial resources on the relative political influence that various organized interests achieve. These lobbyists receive more income and achieve favorable policy outcomes more often than other lobbyists. The value of these revolving-door lobbyists, however, is contingent on the continued presence of former colleagues in legislatures. Former legislators achieve influence because of their insider connections, and membership turnover among incumbents decreases the value of this asset for interest groups. I examine the incomes and clienteles of former legislators who lobbied in the American states over seven decades. Turnover is a consistent, negative predictor of revolver value. This effect is enhanced by the presence of legislative staff support. This study is the first to examine the value of revolving-door lobbyists in the state legislatures. My findings imply that reforms that induce turnover help to level playing fields of political advocacy among interests with different levels of financial resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do lobbyists always advocate for the interests of the members or clients employing them, or, under competing pressures, do they sometimes take positions on bills reflecting the interests of lawmakers or other lobbyists? Do they, in fact, lobby strategically by making choices that balance competing pressures in pursuit of goals like furthering their careers? Most lobbying research assumes that interest groups and lobbyists are the same, but I argue that the interests of lobbyists may be different from those they represent, which I test with a model of strategic lobbying using data on positions lobbyists took on bills in Congress from 2006 to 2017 made available by MapLight. I find that lobbyists sometimes do take positions at odds with member interests under pressure from legislators, other lobbyists, and the president, though some groups can constrain their lobbyists. I conclude by speculating on what this means for lobbying as a form of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the potential for a successful private sector career induce legislators to leave office? How does this affect the representation voters receive? I show that when former US senators—who now work as lobbyists—become more successful, currently serving senators with similar characteristics are more likely to take private sector employment. I replicate all results on data from the House. A number of tests suggest that senators react to the opportunity costs of holding office. Investigating selection effects, I find that legislative specialists are attracted the most in the Senate. Preliminary evidence suggests that the least wealthy respond most strongly in the House. This suggests that the revolving door shapes the skill set of legislators and the representation voters receive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an age of statutes, legislative advocates influence the substantive content of almost every law. Yet scholars know very little about the role that advocates play in shaping statutory law because the study of legislative advocacy has been left to political scientists, who focus on the political rather than the legal aspects of legislative lawmaking. This Article responds to this gap in the literature by presenting an innovative, mixed methods approach to studying legislative advocacy that brings law back into the study of legislative advocacy and provides more accurate descriptions of how legislative advocates behave. This legal approach to legislative advocacy improves on the existing political science literature by emphasizing the legislative process as a lawmaking enterprise and highlighting the importance of the substantive content of statutory laws to legislative advocates and their behavior. The Article demonstrates the utility of this approach by presenting new empirical data on American Indian advocacy. My analysis produces two important insights about legislative advocates' behavior overlooked in previous studies. First, it reveals that advocates perceive legislative advocacy to be about modifying the substantive content of a proposed law. Legislative advocates take the law seriously as they engage in nuanced and sophisticated strategies to interact with legislators and other political actors to craft statutory laws. They advocate on a wide range of proposed laws, shift their positions strategically throughout the legislative process, and frequently seek to modify proposed laws. Second, my account of Indian advocacy emphasizes that legislative advocacy involves legal as well as political work. Indian advocates regularly used legal frames and arguments to educate and persuade legislators to shape the law in ways that better responded to their needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislatures in modern democratic nation states are social arrangements in which individuals elected as representatives interact with each other and with professional lobbyists according to quite specific transactional modes, producing continually updated bodies of legislation. It is widely assumed that the purpose of such legislation is or should be to benefit the society to which it applies, at least on balance. But analysis of the epistemic limitations of legislators, studies of the potential for opportunism enabled by the types of transactions that take place within legislatures, and empirical documentation of so-called "government failure" create doubt as to the validity of that assumption, and raise the question of how such a social arrangement can not only survive but grow in its influence over society. It is suggested that better understanding of this phenomenon can be had if the assumption of purpose, inappropriate for a complex social arrangement in that it conflates systemic purposes with ones appropriate for individuals, is abandoned and the legislative system's operation is examined in terms of the overall organization of the processes which take place within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do local governments sometimes hire lobbyists to represent them in other levels of government? I argue that such mobilization efforts depend in part on the policy congruence between localities and their elected delegates in the legislature. I provide evidence consistent with this theory by examining how municipal governments in the United States respond to partisan and ideological mismatches with their state legislators—a common representational challenge. Using almost a decade of original panel data on municipal lobbying in all 50 states, I employ difference-in-differences and a regression discontinuity design to demonstrate that cities are significantly more likely to hire lobbyists when their districts elect non-co-partisan state representatives. The results are broadly consistent with a model of intergovernmental mobilization in which local officials purchase advocacy to compensate for the preference gaps that sometimes emerge in multilevel government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on alleged paradox of regulating lobbying through legislation in the U.S. Topics discussed include lobbyists' interests in promoting legislation that regulates lobbying; legislators' interest in improving the reliability of information provided by lobbyists; and the views of economist Franklin Fischer on the same.

The Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence is perhaps one of the most convoluted areas of law the Court has developed. Town of Greece v. Galloway, a recent case which held that sectarian legislative prayer policies are constitutional, has only added to the uncertainty and confusion. Consequently, a circuit split has emerged relating to a penumbra of Galloway - legislator-led and legislator-exclusive legislative prayer policies. The Fourth Circuit has held that such practices do not fall within the scope of Galloway and are unconstitutional, while the Sixth Circuit has held that Galloway clearly indicates that such practices are constitutional. Because of the inequities such a split creates and given the dangers of legislator-led and legislator-exclusive prayer policies, this Comment recommends that the Supreme Court step in to resolve the circuit split and adopt a strict scrutiny analysis for all legislator-led legislative prayer cases going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the role of social movement allies in Congress in advancing proenvironmental legislation. We argue that compared to sponsors of legislation who hold moderate views, sponsors with extreme ideological positions will be less likely to produce legislation desired by the environmental movement. We also argue that protest and organizational advocacy by constituents will increase the rate at which sponsors enact environmental legislation. Using event history techniques that follow over 12,000 environmental bills from 1973-1996, we find support for the argument that environmental bills are more successful when sponsored by legislators who have environmental voting records closer to the median voter in Congress, compared to bills sponsored by representatives holding more extreme positions. We also find that the number of environmental lobbyist organizations has a positive effect on the speed of enactment of environmental legislation, but that protest by constituents does not affect the speed of the bill's passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]