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Who walks through the revolving door? Examining the lobbying activity of former members of Congress

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Abstract

Government watchdog groups and the government itself have shown concern about the ‘revolving door’ of employees moving from Congress to private lobbying organizations. As of yet, the academic literature analyzing who becomes a revolving door lobbyist is small but growing. We contribute to this literature by examining which former members of Congress become lobbyists. We construct a data set of all members of Congress who left the institution between 1976 and 2012, identifying those who go on to register as lobbyists. We observe several trends. Among these: there is not a significant difference in the rates at which former House members and senators become lobbyists; institutional standing (in the form of party leadership and other such positions) has a profound effect on which former House members become lobbyists, but less so among former senators; and there is some evidence that Republican former senators are more likely to become lobbyists than Democratic former senators, but this party difference is virtually absent among former House members.

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Notes

  1. Since 1995, to be required to register as lobbyists, a person must spend (that is, be paid) at least $3000 per quarter and 20 per cent or more of her time lobbying for a single client, where lobbying is defined as ‘lobbying contacts and any efforts in support of such contacts, including preparation or planning activities, research and other background work that is intended, at the time of its preparation, for use in contacts and coordination with the lobbying activities of others’, (Senate Office of Public Records, 2013, p. 4; the House uses the same definition). Former Members of Congress frequently serve as ‘consultants’ at law firms (which, in Washington, are all lobbying firms) and do not meet the threshold of being required to register. (Lobbying Disclosure Act, 1995; Foreign Agents Registration Act, 1938; Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, 2007).

  2. Before 1976, very few former members of Congress register as lobbyists. Even within our data set, before 1980 only 1 of 42 departing senators (2 per cent) and 6 of 155 departing House members (4 per cent) registers as lobbyists. This seemingly low rate is likely to underreport lobbying activity by former members, because the Regulation of Lobbying Act of 1946 limited registration requirements to persons who collect money for the ‘principal purpose’ of influencing the passage or defeat of legislation. In 1954, the Supreme Court further eased the requirement by not defining ‘principal purpose’ and not treating communication with congressional staff as attempts to influence legislation.

  3. The year 1992 was also the year of the House Bank scandal, and as well was the last year members of Congress could convert unused campaign money into personal use; these trends furthercontribute to the exceptional number of departures that year.

  4. Also, House members who became senators are not included. These members enter our data set only as former senators if and when they depart that chamber.

  5. Owing to the loopholes mentioned above, there is reason to believe that CRP may tend to undercount the number of revolving-door lobbyists. This affects our results only if the unidentified members are systematically different from the identified members in the characteristics we describe in our variables. We have no reason to believe this is so.

  6. We recognize the limitations of comparing DW-NOMINATE scores across Congresses, but believe that they serve as a reasonable proxy for member ideology.

  7. Strictly speaking, these are not mutually exclusive groups since the chairs of these committees are coded as both chairs and members of their committees. However, we treat them as such for the purpose of this analysis.

  8. Many if not most revolvers have registered as lobbyists who are employed by several different employers. We focus on the first one to simplify the coding scheme, but also because a case can be made that the first employer is the most important one from a normative standpoint. We argue that a member becomes a lobbyist to exploit her extant social connections within Congress, and those social connections will be strongest immediately upon the member’s departure from Congress. They will only get weaker over time, as the former member’s friends and colleagues themselves depart the chamber. Thus, each member’s first employer reaps the strongest benefit of the member’s social connections. In addition, to the extent the prospect of future employment motivates a member of Congress to behave differently in his last term of office, the benefitting employer will be the first one to hire the member after he departs Congress.

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Correspondence to Jeffrey Lazarus.

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Lazarus, J., McKay, A. & Herbel, L. Who walks through the revolving door? Examining the lobbying activity of former members of Congress. Int Groups Adv 5, 82–100 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2015.16

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