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For decades, political scientists have had two divergent views on lobbyists in Washington. On the one hand they focus on the privileged access of a few groups in balkanized issue niches, and on the other they observe highly inclusive lobbying campaigns where hundreds of lobbyists vigorously compete for policymakers' attention. Not surprisingly, these disparate observations lead to contradictory conclusions about lobbying tactics, relations with relevant policymakers, and the nature of interest group influence. In this paper we make a simple, yet novel, empirical observation: these disparate inferences about lobbying at the micro-level are not inconsistent when we uncover the structure of lobbyists' interactions at the macro-level. That is, both views are correct, depending on the policy context. Using data from 293,631 Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) reports filed between 1998 and 2008--which consists of 2,077,404 observations of 35,826 individual lobbyists reporting lobbying activity in 78 issue areas--we reveal that the Washington lobbying community has a fundamental and stable core-periphery structure. We then document how the empirically derived core-periphery mapping is a superior way to differentiate bandwagon or issue niche policy domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use data from 499,838 semiannual reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) of 1995 to investigate the degree to which networks of lobbyists are linked with each other or operate independently as cliques, and to measure the stability of network characteristics over time. Each lobbying network is linked by individuals who report lobbying activity in one of 77 government-defined issue areas listed on LDA reports. For each of 32,045 lobbyists who have registered in any six-month reporting period from 1998 to 2007, we use social network analysis (SNA) techniques to estimate the centrality of each issue area. The time-series nature of our data set allows us to assess the dynamics of issue area centrality over time. We find that lobbying networks are remarkably stable over time, though we identify a few notable outliers that indicate that events outside the lobbying networks can affect their basic structure. Further, for each issue area, we calculate lobbyists' specialization and the proportion of for-hire contract lobbyists, and find that both specialization and contract lobbying are highly correlated to lobbying network centrality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]