Cities in the Statehouse: How Local Governments Use Lobbyists to Secure State Funding

Payson, Julia

doi:10.1086/706767

Cited by 51 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…When do local governments mobilize as interest groups and hire lobbyists to represent them in other levels of government? Elected offcials of all types lobby each other frequently—both in the United States and other federal systems—and these efforts can dramatically influence the distribution of intergovernmental transfers and other policy outcomes (De Figueiredo and Silverman 2006; Goldstein and You 2017; Payson 2020; Sorensen 2003). But most theories of interest group mobilization focus on the behavior of membership-based groups and business interests and are less well equipped to explain variation in the intergovernmental context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Partisan Logic of City Mobilization: Evidence from State Lobbying Disclosures

Payson

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Partisan Logic of City Mobilization: Evidence from State Lobbying Disclosures

Payson

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…There has already been some productive work that adopts this approach, including work studying the policy effects of government employee unions (e.g., Moe 2011;Hartney and Flavin 2011;Anzia and Moe 2015, forthcoming;DiSalvo and Kucik 2017), state business associations and conservative networks (Hertel-Fernandez et al 2016; Hertel-Fernandez forthcoming), and even the lobbying efforts of governments themselves (Payson 2018). Perhaps tellingly, each one finds some evidence that groups are shaping the policy outcomes they care about.…”

Section: Interest Group Influencementioning

confidence: 99%

Looking for Influence in All the Wrong Places: How Studying Subnational Policy Can Revive Research on Interest Groups

Anzia

2019

The Journal of Politics

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The American politics literature on representation focuses on voters and elected officials, but a growing group of political scientists is arguing that more should be done to study interest groups. Yet there already is a large literature on interest groups-and it has struggled to show evidence of interest group influence. I argue here that the interest group literature's nearexclusive focus on the federal government has hindered its progress: basic questions have gone unasked, important interest groups have gone underappreciated, and the amount of influence has been underestimated. By studying U.S. subnational policymaking, scholars would discover different constellations of interest groups, and they would find that the variation in subnational governments allows for empirical designs that are better able to detect interest group influence when it exists. The payoffs of a subnational focus would be substantial-both for our understanding of interest groups and for the study of political representation.

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“…There is even less research on municipalities lobbying state governments. A major recent study is one by Payson (2018), who frames her investigation on local governments lobbying their state within both the lobbying literature and the fiscal federalism literature. Payson describes the contributions of fiscal federalism research to our understanding of local government lobbying, but notes that: “scholars have generally lacked the rigorous empirical measures to capture subnational efforts to influence the center.…”

Section: The Scope Of the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet the collective understanding of these organizations is weaker without this foundation. Likewise, while scholars have examined the factors that influence cities to hire lobbyists (Loftis and Kettler 2015; Goldstein and You 2017; Payson 2018), less is known about the decision processes of those deciding to hire a lobbyist.…”

Section: Taking Stock—avenues For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intergovernmental Lobbying in the United States: Assessing the Benefits of Accumulated Knowledge

Jensen

2018

State and Local Government Review

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In the last fifteen years, there has been a significant accumulation of research on lobbyists and lobbying offices that represent state and local governments either in Washington or in state capitals. This essay seeks to review the scope of these and earlier efforts and assess where our knowledge is deepest and where significant unanswered questions remain. In general, there is substantially more research on lobbyists who represent governors than those representing other types of public officials. Further, research has paid more attention to lobbying in the federal arena than to lobbying in state capitals. Recent research on local government lobbying, however, has led to significant gains in our ability to measure the financial benefits of intergovernmental lobbying.

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Cities in the Statehouse: How Local Governments Use Lobbyists to Secure State Funding

Cited by 51 publications

References 19 publications

The Partisan Logic of City Mobilization: Evidence from State Lobbying Disclosures

The Partisan Logic of City Mobilization: Evidence from State Lobbying Disclosures

Looking for Influence in All the Wrong Places: How Studying Subnational Policy Can Revive Research on Interest Groups

Intergovernmental Lobbying in the United States: Assessing the Benefits of Accumulated Knowledge

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