Does Lobbying Affect Bill Advancement? Evidence from Three State Legislatures

Abstract

Many studies consider the effect of lobbying on the behavior of individual legislators, but few studies demonstrate a relationship between lobbying and the ultimate dispositions of bills by the legislature. One challenge to establishing this latter relationship is data scarcity, as few legislatures systematically collect and publish information on organized interests’ lobbying activities on each bill. We provide new insights on lobbying by using data from Colorado, Nebraska, and Wisconsin that records the positions organized interests take on proposals in those states’ legislatures. We find that organized interests’ lobbying predicts outcomes, especially when lobbying is directed against a proposal. We also use our data to test whether lobbying succeeds by building support among legislators (i.e., vote buying) or by affecting a proposal’s advancement through the legislative process (i.e., agenda control). We find that lobbying does not buy the votes of legislators on the committees of jurisdiction for each bill, but lobbying does strongly predict what bills make it onto the agenda. Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions about money and politics, bias in representation, and legislator behavior.

Rent-Seeking Behavior and Economic Justice: A Classroom Exercise

“…This thought experiment can explain why policies often represent the interests of small groups rather than the general public, serving as an entry to discussions about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Other points in this discussion could include the theory of rational ignorance (Downs 1957 ) and research on the prevalence (O’Connell and Narayanswamy 2022 ) and effectiveness of lobbying (Lewis 2013 ; Kang 2016 ; McKay 2018 ; Butler and Miller 2021 ; Chalmers and Macedo 2021 ), the degree to which opinions of different groups impact policy (Gilens and Page 2014 ), and issues such as the revolving door and regulatory capture (Johnson and Kwak 2010 ; Bowles et al 2018 ).…”

CHORUS: A New Dataset of State Interest Group Policy Positions in the United States

“…Interest group scholars can benefit from defining agreed-upon concepts, latent in the observed data, which can enter into useful models of politics. 2 For example, the broader field of legislative studies employs ideal points as one such latent concept: they are inferred via standard methods from standard data sources (roll-call votes), have explanatory and predictive power, and 1 Recent studies have begun to leverage policy positions data from state lobbying disclosures and public statements to fill this gap (Butler and Miller 2022;Crosson, Furnas, and Lorenz 2020;Thieme 2019); we aim to extend these efforts.…”

“…2 The alternative-treating each interest group and each policy as an independent unit of analysis-can yield useful results (e.g., Butler and Miller 2022), but it leaves us incapable of incorporating more complex structures in our models. are critical to many models of legislative politics (Poole and Rosenthal 1991;Shor, Berry, and McCarty 2010;Shor and McCarty 2011).…”

“…More specifically, these states exhibit considerable variation in party control of state legislatures and governorships, legislative professionalization (Squire 2017), and industrial composition. While others have used lobbying positions or similar data from a small handful of state legislatures to study interest group influence and polarization (Butler and Miller 2022;Kroeger 2022;Thieme 2019, our data encompasses considerably more states and allows scholars to use policy preferences to map coalitional lobbying formations in state capitals.…”