Interest Groups in American Politics

America's International Human Rights Policy: The Corporate Lobby

“…13 While there is ample evidence that firms influence human rights directly in the way they do business 14 , this article explains why a very narrow swath of corporate interests infuses a lot-in fact, the majority-of money into the U.S. human rights policy process. Our research also complements debates in the American politics literature about the representativeness and responsiveness of government 15 , and the worry that an -unheavenly chorus‖ of wealthy interest groups may bias policy outcomes-in our case, foreign policies that may affect both America's international relations and human rights norms and 12 Grossman and Helpman 1994;Jacobs and Page 2005;Keohane and Milner 1996;Koh 2011;Lowery 2007;Milner 1997;Nownes 2012;Rogowski 1987. 13 Bombardini and Trebbi 2012;Brasher and Lowery 2006;Drope and Hansen 2006;Kim 2013.…”

Lobbying as Costly Persuasion with Legislative Subsidies

“…1 For example, Congress has 535 members who employed in 2009 around 16,000 staff members, which implied on average 16 staffers per House member and 43 staffers per Senator (Petersen, Reynolds, andWilhelm, 2010 andNownes, 2013). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) employs about 235 economic and other experts (CBO website).…”

“…3 For example, Lessig (2011) reports that Congress members spend up to 30 to 70 percent of their time for raising electoral campaign funds; though having substantial numbers of staffers there were 11,000 bills introduced in the 110th Congress and still more than 1,000 made it beyond their usual short shelf life (Nownes, 2013). 4 Common activities for both internal experts and special interest experts are legislative testimonies.…”

“…4 Common activities for both internal experts and special interest experts are legislative testimonies. A very common legislative subsidy is legislative drafting (Baumgartner, Berry, Hojnacki, Kimball andLeech, 2009 andNownes, 2013) and refers to the practice of lobbyists to actually write the bill proposal that is distributed to other Congress members and submitted to the Congressional Record. For example, lobbyists employed by Genentech, a Roche subsidiary, and two law firms provided talking points to 42 House members, equally distributed across both parties, who submitted them with minor to no changes to the Congressional Record (Pear, 2009).…”

“…40) which is the same as (3.21) as the policymaker finances the implementation of the reform. Hence, the lobby's intensive margins for the updating choice are unaffected and both lobbying instruments are independent.For the other case, in which a lobby is considering to potentially convince a politically active policymaker, a lobby's reform signal would induce an immediate reform and a status quo signal would either not affect the policymaker's choice or result in an immediate rejection of the reform proposal -i.e., λ ≤ λ(x s ) ≤ λ ≤λ ≤ λ(x r ) and λ(x s ) ≤ λ ≤ λ ≤λ ≤ λ(x r ).…”