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Although the liability of foreignness has been shown to present real economic barriers for foreign firms in various contexts around the globe, scholars continue to debate what drives this liability in different market contexts: lack of information due to institutional distance, lack of social embeddedness, discrimination, or something else. In this study, we propose a new theory, that in corporate lobbying within the nonmarket strategy context, the liability of foreignness is driven in no small part by a values-based ideological conflict stemming from the divide between democracy and autocracy. Private-sector firms from autocratic countries face costs of illegitimacy in Washington, D.C., and professional corporate lobbyists charge such firms a fee premium, in effect, to pay for legitimacy. We conduct an empirical study of the lobbying fees charged by professional corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C., to their domestic and foreign firm clients, and the results strongly support the predictions of our theory. We also show that the liability of foreignness in this context endures for foreign firms from autocratic countries over the 15-year length of our sample period. Offering a new theoretical perspective as well as new empirical findings regarding the liability of foreignness, our study has practical implications for managers of foreign firms and may also generalize to other market contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Lobbying allows firms to influence the government to potentially limit firms' costs during product recall crises. However, such lobbying can elicit scrutiny from the media if the lobbying gives the impression that firms wish to save costs at the expense of safety, thereby appearing hypocritical. We theorize that when faced with negative media coverage of product recalls or recall‐related lobbying, firms strategically eschew lobbying to limit further media scrutiny and its associated negative consequences. We test our hypotheses using the US auto industry's lobbying from 2008 to 2022. We provide further depth to our examination of strategic eschewal through 15 supplemental interviews of lobbyists about how the media influences firms' lobbying decisions. Managerial Summary: Companies may resort to lobbying in efforts to reduce costs related to product recall crises, but such controversial lobbying may also tarnish their image. When confronted with negative media coverage of product recalls, or recall‐related lobbying, companies are more likely to strategically refrain from lobbying to minimize additional, unwanted media spotlight and its associated negative repercussions. Managers should be mindful that even if lobbying may help limit the costs of recalls, it could also cause potential reputational harm. Thus, it is vitally important that managers pay attention to the reputational cues from the media, which can help them determine when lobbying may be problematic and allow them to preemptively refrain from such lobbying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities increasingly address climate change, e.g. by pledging city-level emission reduction targets. This is puzzling for the provision of a global public good: what are city governments' reasons for doing so, and do pledges actually translate into emission reductions? Empirical studies have found a set of common factors which relate to these questions, but also mixed evidence. What is still pending is a theoretical framework to explain those findings and gaps. This paper thus develops a theoretical public choice model. It features economies of scale and distinguishes urban reduction targets from actual emission reductions. The model is able to explain the presence of targets and public good provision, yet only under specified conditions. It is also able to support some stylized facts from the empirical literature, e.g. on the effect of city size, and resolves some mixed evidence as special cases. Larger cities chose more ambitious targets if marginal net benefits of mitigation rise with city size—if they set targets at all. Whether target setting is more likely for larger cities depends on the city type. Two types are obtained. The first type reduces more emissions than a free-riding city. Those cities are more likely to set a target when they are larger. However, they miss the self-chosen target. Cities of the second type reach their target, but mitigate less than a free-riding city. A third type does not exist. With its special cases, the model can thus guide further empirical and theoretical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The EU's social dimension has been strengthened since the mid-2010s. Recent research has shown how Commission entrepreneurship in meta-governance such as the European Pillar of Social Rights and the European Semester turned existing regulation in a more 'social' direction or led to new regulation strengthening Social Europe. This article asks whether the Commission also stands out as the most important actor in initiatives focused exclusively on working conditions and if the European social partners also in these are secondary reactive actors. Focusing on a recent case where the social partners had a treaty-based right to bargain—the Working Conditions Directive—the article confirms the Commission's dominance and the reactivity of the social partners. The choice not to bargain reduces the social partners to lobbyists attempting to influence other key actors. However, the case also shows the limits to Commission entrepreneurship in that EU member states and the European Parliament were able to influence the outcome in important ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, Republican-controlled legislatures across the U.S. initiated draconian abortion restrictions. In order to appeal to anti-abortion policymakers, advocates across the country have strategically separated "maternal and child health" (MCH) issues, such as increased insurance coverage for midwifery and doula care, from issues often labeled as "reproductive rights," such as access to sex education, birth control, and abortion. Advocates point out this strategic separation has likely contributed overall to the downfall of abortion rights. In this paper, we analyze legislative discourse to understand the legislative challenges advocates face, the strategic separations and allyships they employ, and the implications for other states and reproductive health more broadly. We find that legislators legitimate the same scientific evidence in some contexts while not in others in order to hold onto rhetorical purity within the abortion debate. In their attempts to parse the ideal abortion seeker, conservative legislators create legal ambiguities with serious consequences for healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligence scholars routinely portray intelligence oversight as a means of restraining intelligence activities, particularly covert operations. The consensus overlooks situations where oversight can instead channel popular passions. This paper documents how Reagan era activists recruited legislators to the Afghan resistance cause. Their legislative-civic alliance demanded the CIA launch more aggressive operations in Afghanistan, sidelining established oversight committees. The resulting covert action campaign risked Soviet escalation, eliminated plausible deniability, and gave advanced U.S. technology to potential terrorists. This episode highlights how well-organized lobbyists may affect the intelligence agenda and challenges assumptions that wider engagement in oversight will always restrain intelligence agencies' overreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political elites must know and rely faithfully on the public will to be democratically responsive. Recent work on elite perceptions of public opinion shows that reelection‐motivated politicians systematically misperceive the opinions of their constituents to be more conservative than they are. We extend this work to a larger and broader set of unelected political elites such as lobbyists, civil servants, journalists, and the like, and report alternative empirical findings. These unelected elites hold similarly inaccurate perceptions about public opinion, though not in a single ideological direction. We find this elite population exhibits egocentrism bias, rather than partisan confirmation bias, as their perceptions about others' opinions systematically correspond to their own policy preferences. Thus, we document a remarkably consistent false consensus effect among unelected political elites, which holds across subsamples by party, occupation, professional relevance of party affiliation, and trust in party‐aligned information sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WIPO-GRTKF specifies, for the first time, how traditional resources embodied by traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and folklore can be defined, and what the relationship between original rights, and rights arising from the transformation and utilisation of traditional resources can be understood. Committed to promoting innovation, shared benefits and balanced interests, WIPO tries to achieve a balance between preventing users from violating holders' original rights through the acquisition of patent, trademark and copyright, and incentivizing all stakeholders to transform traditional resources to improve the greater good. The document triggers a new round of disputes among interest groups over how to share rights arising from the transformation and utilisation of traditional resources. Using an evolutionary game model to simulate how holders and users transform traditional resources, and share rights, we find that when the two sides choose to cooperate to apply for transformation and give consent to use, their benefits are maximised and strategies stabilised. We suggest that in the transforming process, holders' rights and users' interests be given equal emphasis, and an autonomous and open mode combining statutory licensing, and justified utilisation of original rights be employed. We advocate for a hybrid legislative arrangement that integrates the incentive of IPRs as private rights, and the safeguard of public rights. In the dual subject system, both users and holders enjoy multiple rights in the process of protecting and transforming traditional resources. The Chinese approach to transforming traditional resources and sharing their rights will contribute to sustainable development of traditional resource industry across the globe. [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]

For more than one hundred years, professional baseball has enjoyed a form of exemption from federal antitrust laws. Arising from a statement made by the game's first commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that organized baseball is a national institution and not labor--and later enshrined into common law by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's adoption of a now-outdated definition of interstate commerce--baseball's antitrust exemption endures as "an exception, an anomaly and an aberration." Relying on an exemption from antitrust law, owners of Major League Baseball have become exceedingly wealthy based on their carte blanche freedom to act in their collective best interests--sometimes to the detriment of players, rival sports leagues, and fans. Even though the original basis for baseball's antitrust exemption has long since faded, courts and Congress, fearing political backlash or perhaps enjoying the perks of aggressive lobbyists seeking to curry favor, have been loath to lift the exemption. This Article calls for reform to the treatment of professional baseball under federal antitrust laws and suggests that baseball, like all other organized sports, be held subject to competitive scrutiny. Drawing on a careful study of baseball history, legal precedent, and public policy, the Article concludes that even if organized baseball is a national institution, much like its historic use of amateur players, unbalanced schedules, and segregated leagues, the time has come to put baseball's historic antitrust exemption behind us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocacy intelligence is a critical organizational resource fostering long‐term survival and policy success. Policy‐active interest groups such as non‐profits, business associations and labor unions, seek to maintain their competitive advantage among peers and therefore have incentives to remain secretive about the details of their lobbying strategies and membership mobilization. We empirically evaluate this argument based on knowledge sharing interactions in 12 focus group interviews with approximately 50 representatives of interest groups in the Netherlands, Ireland and Denmark. Our research design manipulates the composition of the focus groups to vary the level of competition for political influence and membership among the participants. Strikingly, we find no evidence that either type of competition hampers knowledge sharing. Instead, our novel data point to three fruitful alternative explanations: the importance of socialization, mentorship and personalities of interest group leaders. [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]

The article "Interest-driven Legislation" deals with the topic of lobbying in democracy. It points out that interest groups are an indispensable part of pluralistic democracy and are protected by constitutional law. However, it can be problematic when these groups exert influence on legislation. Various legal means are mentioned to enforce interests, such as public relations, demonstrations, and donations to political parties. The weaknesses of lobbying are also highlighted and examined to determine whether a reassessment of parliamentarism is necessary. Examples of lobbying excesses are mentioned, such as the influence of the automotive lobby in the diesel scandal. Various solution strategies are presented on how the state can deal with lobbying, including the regulation of lobbying and the creation of plurality. The text addresses the topic of lobbying in Germany and Switzerland and proposes measures to curb the influence of lobbyists. [Extracted from the article]

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]

We argue that the everyday language distinction drawn between power and influence is meaningful and significant. There is good reason to believe that much corporate lobbying activity which is currently described under the heading of business power is better understood as attempts to secure negotiated agreements based on exerting influence rather than power and that the latter is usually used only when attempts to use influence have failed. We develop an analytical distinction between influence, understood as successful efforts at persuasion, and power using Keith Dowding's work on power. Drawing upon findings from interviews with corporate professionals operating at the coalface of business and government interaction in Australia, we show that lobbyists generally seek "quiet" behind-the-scenes accommodations with governments via attempts to exert influence rather than power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is broad consensus that lobbyists with government experience are valuable to those who employ them, principally because they possess contacts in government and unique insights into the policy process. Yet the near exclusive focus on government experience as the defining feature of lobbyist careers, means the literature has neglected analysis of the mix of different (and important) experiences that actual lobbyists likely accumulate during their careers. We address these gaps through analysis of the career sequences of over 600 lobbyists operating across contract and in‐house roles in Australia. Using the tools of sequence and cluster analysis, we identify four broad types of careers among lobbyists. While half of all lobbyists have had roles with some direct political experience, we find that distinctions between types of lobbying careers are differentiated by experience in other fields such as journalism, public relations, associations and corporate life. Moreover, our multivariate analysis shows that different career types are more strongly associated with in‐house versus contract lobbying roles. We conclude that scholars should move beyond a focus on 'revolving doors' to more directly analyse the range of experiences that lobbyists leverage in their professional lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delves into the complex relationship between humans and dogs in urban settings. It raises the question of whether dogs would be able to survive and thrive without human intervention, suggesting that dogs have the capacity to adapt and live independently. The article also explores the historical and cultural factors that have influenced the way humans interact with dogs, such as the rise of pet ownership and the containment of stray dogs. It challenges the idea that dogs are simply products of human domestication and highlights the intricate and ever-changing nature of human-dog relationships. Additionally, the article examines the broader issue of how animals are treated and perceived in urban environments, focusing on the exploitation and commodification of animals. It discusses the origins of animal protection laws and the complex relationship between humane organizations and industry. The text also highlights the contributions of Henry Bergh, who founded the ASPCA and advocated for legislative protections for animals. It explores the tension between compassion and necessity in animal welfare and questions the concept of human exceptionalism throughout history. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of recognizing the agency of animals and envisioning a future that involves more collaboration with them. [Extracted from the article]

This study delves into the complexities surrounding the determination, interpretation, and application of maqāsid al-sharī'a within modern Islamic economics and finance. By conducting an extensive review of classical and contemporary literature, this research explores the diverse methods and criteria employed for ascertaining maqāsid. It critically examines the inherent subjectivity involved in categorizing maqāsid, shedding light on the ambiguity in delineating their boundaries. Additionally, the study scrutinizes the unintended consequences of broader utilization of maqāsid, particularly in transactions such as bay' al-'īnah, and evaluates the risks associated with prioritizing maslaha (utility) over textual evidence. The findings underscore the challenges posed by the subjective nature of maqāsid interpretation, illustrating how diverse perspectives can lead to differing conclusions. They emphasize the potential misuse of maqāsid for legitimizing practices contrary to the core principles of sharia. This research underscores the preservation of legislative intent and advocates a cautious approach to integrating maqāsid al-sharī'a into Islamic economics and finance. The objective is to strike a balance that upholds Islamic principles. It highlights the essential need for collectively establishing standards for both macro and micro maqāsid and their usage in ijtihād, promoting responsible applications within contemporary Islamic finance for informed and ethical solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the first direct analysis of the influence of revolving-door lobbyists over the content of adopted public laws. We use earmarks to evaluate both the effects of lobbying and the possible additional effects of lobbying by individuals who formerly worked as congressional members and staff. Employing a fixed-effects panel approach, we evaluate original data describing the lobbying efforts of the more than 5000 accredited U.S. colleges and universities over a 12-year timeframe. Our analysis indicates that schools that lobby in a given year can expect to receive 54% more earmarks and 24% more earmarked funds relative to other schools and other years. Further, there is an additional significant effect of revolving-door lobbying that is greatest at lower levels of lobbying expenditures. Our results contribute to the emerging literature on comparative lobbying and speak to concerns about the possible corrupting influence of revolving-door lobbying over public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]