Abstract
Constitutional conventions are popularly expected to attract many organized interests seeking to enshrine particularistic benefits into law for perpetuity, but there is limited empirical research on interest mobilization and lobbying at conventions. I propose that conventions attract different types of interests than legislative sessions and that, as a result, fears over runaway lobbying at conventions are overblown. Conventions and sessions differ in ways that affect interest mobilization. As opposed to legislators, convention delegates lack electoral incentives and focus on framework-related issues. Unlike proposed statutes, proposed constitutions must be approved by voters directly. These three differences discourage lobbying by narrow interests and encourage lobbying by broad interests. To test my claims, I examine archival records to identify the interests and lobbyists that were active during eight past conventions in American states. The findings contradict popular narratives: conventions attracted higher proportions of broad, membership-based interests than legislative sessions, and fewer interests overall as well. While convention interests employed comparable numbers of lobbyists as did session interests, they employed fewer multi-client lobbyists, on average. These findings have implications for how future conventions may be structured to ensure that constitutions are most representative of broad interests.
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Notes
These states include, in the chronological order of their conventions: Michigan, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Illinois, Montana, and North Dakota.
While some states allow for amendments to be popularly initiated, this method is rare in comparison with how often legislatures propose amendments for popular approval. Moreover, legislatively referred amendments are more typically approved by voters than citizen-initiated ones (Sturm 1978).
While Hammons (1999) shows that state constitutions have acquired more particularistic content over time, he does not indicate whether conventions or amendment processes are most responsible for this trend.
While some conventions do feature incumbent legislators, delegates generally are not legislators (Snider 2017). While it is rare for incumbent legislators to serve as delegates in the conventions I examine, my theory is focused on inter-group differences (i.e., differences in mobilization between monetary and personnel interests). As will be shown, convention-level traits are partialled using fixed effects. Any effect of different numbers of legislator-delegates are captured by those effects.
From Hammons (1999), it is unclear whether particularistic clauses were adopted by convention delegates or were adopted as amendments. There may be a middle ground, however, as Zackin (2013) obscures the boundary between narrow-interest and fundamental matters somewhat. She argues that state constitutions contain clauses that are simultaneously “highly detailed policy mandate[s]” and recognitions of “fundamental value[s]” (27). State constitutions express fundamental goals even if the specific issues states face require detailed instructions. For example, delegates to the 1967 constitutional convention in New York supported maintaining the 1938 constitution’s “forever wild” section protecting state forests from logging despite the section containing specific policy instructions.
Close examinations of the changes that conventions proposed suggest that delegates often focused on framework-related clauses. In Michigan, delegates to the 1961 convention debated such issues as rights (e.g., searches and seizures), suffrage for 18-year-olds (which was defeated), elections (including residency requirements), direct democracy (including the recall), separation-of-powers, legislative reforms (such as reapportionment), local government (including home rule and eminent domain), education, and budgeting including debt limitations (Sturm 1963, 152–248). In a review of Maryland’s proposed constitution of 1967, Wheeler and Kinsey (1970, 67–152) found that such issues as separation-of-powers (e.g., veto power, selection of judges, bureaucratic structure), legislative reforms (e.g., bicameralism, multi-member districting, salaries), local government (e.g., home rule, regional governments), budgets (e.g., lotteries debt limitations), and rights (e.g., education, consumer protections) were all discussed and debated at length during the convention. Also, in a comprehensive listing of constitutional revisions proposed by delegates to the 1969 Illinois convention, Clark (1973, 161–167) finds that nearly all of the proposed changes dealt with framework-related issues, including many of the same issues discussed in Michigan and Maryland. All these authors emphasize much less so, or not at all, particularistic matters such as tax exemptions, subsidies, or regulations.
This proposed effect is independent of the effect of delegates’ lack of electoral incentives.
A lesser-studied category of interests, bureaucratic ones such as local governments and utilities, might also appear at conventions to provide information to delegates regarding framework-related matters.
In Ohio, the 1912 convention adopted a rule (No. 105) that required all persons who sought to discuss matters pending before committees or present arguments to delegates first register with the convention secretary. This rule preceded the legislature’s requirement, which was enacted a year later. In Massachusetts, the legislature’s Sergeant-at-Arms had registered lobbyists since 1891. When a convention met in 1916, it adopted the state’s lobby law as a rule and required that convention lobbyists register. In Michigan, the convention adopted a resolution requiring “convention agents” to register with the convention president (Sturm 1963). The resolution also required the filing of expense reports, which was not required under the legislature’s usual lobby law (Pollock 1962). In New York, the legislature enacted a law requiring that lobbyists active during the convention register with the Secretary of State (Greenwald 1971). In Maryland and Pennsylvania, lobbyists also had to register with convention secretaries. In New Mexico and Illinois, the state legislatures passed laws in 1969 requiring that lobbyists active during conventions register with each state’s secretary of state (Evans 1969; Kitsos and Pisciotte 1969). Those who sought to lobby delegates in Montana or North Dakota also had to register with secretaries of state. In Louisiana, delegates adopted a resolution based on that state’s new lobby law, enacted in 1972. Convention lobbyists had to register with the convention secretary. In Texas, since legislators formed their own convention, the usual law applied and lobbyists applied with the Secretary of State. Legislators in Tennessee enacted a law in 1976 stipulating that convention lobbyists were subject to the same registration requirements as legislative lobbyists.
In other states, still, wholesale constitutional revision occurred in other ways that involved lobbying. In 1976, Georgia’s legislature formed a committee to draft a new constitution. The legislature considered both the committee’s proposed constitution and legislative redistricting plans during a special session in 1981 (Holmes 1984; Hill 2011). Lobbyists were active during the session and registered.
New Mexico’s legislature first enacted registration in 1967, but the oldest available lobbyist list was from 1973.
While some interests initially proved difficult to classify, primary- and secondary-source documents helped to indicate which groups contained autonomous individuals as members. Such documents were frequently located on Google Books and Newspapers.com, although a small number of interests might be misclassified in error.
Included in this category are all voluntary organizations, including those that do not traditionally lobby. As an example, the few hobby groups in my data set, such as sports leagues, are included in this category since their members are autonomous individuals. In the narrative, broader interests represent larger constituencies. These interests often advocate for goods from government that benefit their broad memberships and are, as a result, more collective in nature. Given the broader memberships of these interests, they command personnel resources more effectively than narrow interests during times of political mobilization.
In New Mexico, the governor called for a constitutional revision commission, and the legislature authorized a commission during its 1963 session. It met for several years prior to the convention. Legislators formed advisory committees for meeting with the commission (“Executive Step Taken,” 1963).
These trends persist for the Massachusetts convention and those with partial or merely descriptive lobby data. In Massachusetts, 325 and 27 interest organizations registered to lobby during the session and convention, respectively. In Ohio, 125 interests registered for the 1915 session and 9 for the convention. Lobbyist (not interest group) totals are available for Louisiana and Texas. While 260 lobbyists registered during Louisiana’s 1975 session, 240 appeared at its convention (Grant 1981). In Texas, 2676 lobbyists registered during the 1973 regular session, but the convention attracted 475 lobbyists (May 1975). No secondary sources report registration statistics for Tennessee’s convention.
My results remain substantively unchanged when observations from Pennsylvania’s convention are excluded.
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Appendix: descriptive information
Appendix: descriptive information
The following eight tables (Tables 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14) present descriptive statistics regarding interest mobilization at each of the eight constitutional conventions examined in this study. The first column presents the interest types, the second column presents the number present during both sessions and conventions, and the third column is the mobilization rate for session interests. As an example, from Table 7: 34 unique interests (across all interest types) active during the legislative session in Michigan appeared at that state’s convention. These interests were 23.288% of all the interests active during the session. Eleven monetary interests active during the state’s session appeared at the convention, or 13.75% of all monetary interests. The fourth columns of the tables provide the number of interests within each category that appeared anew at conventions, and the fifth columns provide the percentage of interests (within each type) that were new at the conventions. For example, eight monetary interests mobilized anew for Michigan’s convention (i.e., were not active during the preceding legislative session) such that 42.105% of all the monetary interests active at the convention were new.
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Strickland, J.M. Lobbying at constitutional conventions: venues for the people. Int Groups Adv 11, 517–544 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-022-00166-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-022-00166-z