Is it Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process
69 Pages Posted: 7 Feb 2011 Last revised: 9 Feb 2011
There are 2 versions of this paper
Is it Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process
Date Written: February 2011
Abstract
What do lobbyists do? Some believe that lobbyists' main role is to provide issue-specific information and expertise to congressmen to help guide the law-making process. Others believe that lobbyists mainly provide the firms and other special interests they represent with access to politicians in their "circle of influence" and that this access is the be-all and end-all of how lobbyists affect the lawmaking process. This paper combines a descriptive analysis with more targeted testing to get inside the black box of the lobbying process and inform our understanding of the relative importance of these two views of lobbying. We exploit multiple sources of data covering the period 1999 to 2008, including: federal lobbying registration from the Senate Office of Public Records, Federal Election Commission reports, committee and subcommittee assignments for the 106th to 110th Congresses, and background information on individual lobbyists. A pure issue expertise view of lobbying does not fit the data well. Instead, maintaining connections to politicians appears central to what lobbyists do. In particular, we find that whom lobbyists are connected to (through political campaign donations) directly affects what they work on. More importantly, lobbyists appear to systematically switch issues as the politicians they were previously connected to switch committee assignments, hence following people they know rather than sticking to issues. We also find evidence that lobbyists that have issue expertise earn a premium, but we uncover that such a premium for lobbyists that have connections to many politicians and Members of Congress is considerably larger.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
By Oliver Hart and Bengt R. Holmström
-
By Oliver Hart and Bengt R. Holmström
-
Incentives, Information, and Organizational Form
By Yingyi Qian, Eric Maskin, ...
-
On the Design of Hierarchies: Coordination Versus Specialization
By Oliver Hart and John Moore
-
On the Design of Hierarchies: Coordination Versus Specialization
By Oliver Hart and John Moore
-
On the Design of Hierarchies: Coordination Versus Specialization
By Oliver Hart and John Moore
-
When Does Coordination Require Centralization
By Ricardo Alonso, Wouter Dessein, ...
-
When Does Coordination Require Centralization?
By Ricardo Alonso, Wouter Dessein, ...
-
Reallocation of Corporate Resources and Managerial Incentives in Internal Capital Markets
By Sandro Brusco and Fausto Panunzi
-
Reallocation of Corporate Resources and Managerial Incentives in Internal Capital Markets
By Sandro Brusco and Fausto Panunzi
