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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]

Campaign donors and corporate interests have greater access to Congress, and the legislative agenda and policy outcomes reflect their preferences. How this privileged access converts into influence remains unclear because petitioner-legislator interactions are unobserved. In this article, we report the results of an original survey experiment of 436 congressional staffers. The vignette manipulates a petitioner's identity, the substance of the request, and the supporting evidence being offered. We test how likely staff are to take a meeting, to use the information being offered, and to recommend taking a position consistent with the request, as well as whether they perceive the request to be congruent with constituent preferences. Donors and lobbyists are no more likely to be granted access than constituents, but staffers are more likely to use information and to make legislative action recommendations when the information source is an ideologically aligned think tank. Subgroup analysis suggests these effects are particularly strong among ideological extremists and strong partisans. And, information offered by aligned think tanks are thought to be representative of constituent opinion. Our results reveal the partisan and ideological predispositions that motivate legislative action that is more costly than merely granting access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, members of the US House have shifted resources away from legislative functions to representational activities. We reveal this decline using an original dataset constructed from 236,000 quarterly payroll disbursements by 1,090 member offices for 120,000 unique staff between the 103rd and 113th Congresses, as well as interviews with former members and staff in Congress. These data allow us to test two plausible alternative explanations, one rooted in the centralization of legislative power over time and the other in conservatives' desires to contract government power. We show that the decline in legislative capacity is symmetrical between and consistent within both parties, contrary to expectations rooted in asymmetrical, ideological sabotage. Additionally, this divestment occurs within incumbent member offices over time, accelerates when new members replace incumbents, and persists when majority control changes. We conclude that competition over institutional control and centralization of legislative functions motivates declining legislative capacity among individual members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although political scientists have increasingly focused on the role of gender in the policy process and the characteristics of individual lobbyists, little is known about the gender politics of the government relations profession. We extend the study of professional women to the unique political context of Washington, DC, lobbying, an important form of political participation that is understudied in terms of gender. Using data from more than 25,000 individuals registered to lobby the federal government from 2008 to 2015, we show that women account for 37% of the lobbyist population in Washington, that female lobbyists are more likely to work as in-house employees than for contract lobbying firms, and that the largest Washington lobbying firms are strongly biased towards employing men. We add to these findings qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 23 lobbyists to reveal how the professional experiences of women often depend on the idiosyncrasies of lobbying employment and the political nature of their work. We conclude that the underrepresentation of women in the professional lobbying community is an underappreciated problem with broader implications for gender equality in elite political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]