Abstract
Although experience inside the halls of power afford lobbyists valuable political, policy and procedural skills that can improve the deliberative process, it also gives them privileged access to former employers that others do not have. Washington’s revolving door evokes legitimate ethical concerns, such as when former legislators resign their seats to take lucrative jobs representing the very industries they regulate. However, social scientists know surprisingly little about the revolving door beyond such sensational, albeit important, cases. To shed more light on the broader phenomenon, we systematically explore the revolving door on a large scale to answer a simple question: Do revolving door lobbyists represent different interests than conventional lobbyists? If, as revolving door proponents imply, these lobbyists work on behalf of organized interests solely for their specialized subject-matter expertise, then we would expect them to represent clienteles that are no different than conventional lobbyists. Alternatively, if they represent a wider variety of economic interests than conventional lobbyists then we assume they are hired more for their ability to get a foot in the door than to serve as policy expert adjuncts to government. Using evidence from original data on the professional biographies of roughly 1600 registered lobbyists – which we link to data from almost 50 000 quarterly Lobbying Disclosure Act reports – we expose a significant transparency loophole in the law. Because lobbyists are not required to continuously disclose their ‘covered official’ status – the statutory definition of revolving door – periodic lobbying disclosure reports effectively hide the revolving door from public scrutiny. Instead, we rely on our more comprehensive information on lobbyists’ connections to previous employers to more accurately measure the size and scope of Washington’s revolving door, and to investigate how these connections affect which interests they represent. We find that revolving door lobbyists have worked mostly in Congress, tend to work as contract lobbyists rather than in-house government-relations staff and are more likely to specialize in lobbying for appropriations earmarks. Then, after controlling for a variety of lobbying specializations, we show that former members of Congress are no more likely than other lobbyists to attract a more economically diverse set of clients than their conventional-lobbyist counterparts. However, congressional staffers who had worked their way up the organizational ladder on Capitol Hill do. We infer that well-connected congressional staffers who spin through the revolving door sell access to key decision makers in Congress, not their industry- or issue-specific technical or substantive expertise. Simply, the revolving door problem is not limited to a handful of headline-catching former legislators, is much bigger than the existing lobbying disclosure regime reveals and – most importantly – significantly distorts the representation of interests before government. The practical implications are clear: lobbying transparency rules, cooling-off periods and other restrictions are insufficient disincentives. Interest group demand for access is simply too strong. We advocate enhancing lobbying transparency by expanding the statutory definitions of lobbying activities, requiring lobbyists to disclose more details about government employment and shifting some of the disclosure burden to democratically accountable government officials themselves.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We do not assume relatively fixed economic interests and relatively volatile political issues to be perfectly aligned. But we do assume that issue expert lobbyists will tend to represent a set of organizations with highly similar interests.
Though a revolving door lobbyist’s work sequentially precedes their lobbying employment in time, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for that employment. Accordingly, we treat previous government work status and current lobbying employment status as independent, though we empirically examine the relationship between those select lobbyists who had worked for the government.
By definition, the identities of registered lobbyists is public information. However, we choose to keep them anonymous here. Lobbyists’ names will be made available by the authors upon request for replication purposes.
The two-sample difference in mean test for former members of Congress suggests that the 0.41 per cent nominal difference is not significantly different from 0, z=1.49, P=0.135.
LD-2 reports are filed at the registrant-client level of analysis. Individual lobbyists may be listed for as few or as many issue areas mentioned on these reports. This measure disaggregates these reports to the lobbyist-issue area level, and sums.
A description of the original sources coders used to identify biographical data for each lobbyist can be found in Table A1 in the appendix.
Typically, these jobs were as judicial clerks, which does not match the intuitive definition of the revolving door. We report them here, but exclude them from subsequent analyses.
CRP’s study is not a direct comparison to our sample, as they do not distinguish former members of Congress employed by the private sector who do or do not register to lobby.
Thirty-three in-house lobbyists had more than one client in 2008 because they switched employers at some point during the calendar year. In these cases, we coded the lobbyist’s contract status according to their destination employer as listed in the fourth quarter, and treat the results as measurement error.
The LDA requires lobbyists to report clients only if they earned US$5000 or more on their behalf on lobbying activities. Many lobbyists consult clients on legal and public relations matters as well, so while they may continue under retainer in a given reporting period, they may be engaged in activities that do not require reporting.
In both models, we assume that revolving door effects on clientele diversity do not decay over time – having previously worked in the federal government is an individual characteristic that remains important to client recruitment over time. To consider the potential for endogeneity, we examined a two-stage version of Model 1 that predicted revolving door status on lobbying specialization in the first stage. Estimation results did not significantly differ from those reported in Table 6.
We also collected data on the timing and duration of former government positions, but we are not confident enough in their reliability for inclusion in our analysis. Data were missing for more than half of the sampled lobbyists. Duration and timing data can be identified for more recently employed lobbyists who worked in Congress using the LegiStorm database, but most lobbyists’ biographies do not explicitly state start and end dates of government employment.
References
Bauer, R.A., Pool, Ithiel de Sola and Dexter, L.A. (1963) American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade. New York: Atherton Press.
Baumgartner, F.R. and Leech, B.L. (1998) Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Baumgartner, F.R., Berry, J.M., Hojnacki, M., Kimball, D.C. and Leech, B.L. (2009) Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ben-Naim, A. (2007) Entropy Demystified: The Second Law Reduced to Plain Common Sense. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Company.
Bertrand, M., Bombardini, M. and Trebbi, F. (2011) Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 16765.
Blanes i Vidal, J., Mirko, D. and Christian, F.-R. (2012) Revolving door lobbyists. American Economic Review 102 (7): 3731–3748.
Boydstun, A.E. (2013) Making the News: Politics, Media and Agenda-Setting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Boydstun, A.E., Bevan, S. and Thomas, II H.F. (forthcoming) The importance of agenda diversity and how to measure it. Policy Studies Journal.
Center for Responsive Politics. (2010) The Deregistration Dilemma: Are Lobbyists Quitting the Business as Federal Disclosure Rules Tighten? Washington DC: Center for Responsive Politics.
Center for Responsive Politics. (2011) Revolving Door: Former Members of the 111th Congress, http://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/departing.php, accessed 8 February 2013.
Center for Responsive Politics. (2013) Lobbying: Top Issues, Lobbying Database, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=u, accessed 8 February 2013.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. (2012) Strategic Maneuvers: The Revolving Door from the Pentagon to the Private Sector. Washington, DC: Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Clerk of the United States House of Representatives. (2011) Lobbying Disclosure Act Guidance. Washington DC: House Legislative Resource Center.
Cohen, J.E. (1986) The dynamics of the ‘revolving door’ on the FCC. American Journal of Political Science 30 (4): 689–708.
Deakin, J. (1966) The Lobbyists. Washington DC: Public Affairs Press.
Drutman, L. and Cain, B.E. (forthcoming) Congressional staff and the revolving door: The impact of regulatory change. Election Law Journal.
Eggers, A.C. (2010) The Partisan Revolving Door. Working Paper.
Eggers, A.C. and Hainmueller, J. (2009) MPs for sale? Returns to office in postwar British politics. American Political Science Review 103 (4): 1–21.
Esterling, K.M. (2004) The Political Economy of Expertise. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Fried, C., Gordon, R.H., Potter, T. and Sandler, J.E. (2011) Lobbying Law in the Spotlight: Challenges and Proposed Improvements. Washington DC: American Bar Association Task Force on Federal Lobbying Laws.
Furlong, S.R. (1997) Interest group influence on rulemaking. Administration and Society 29: 325–48.
González-Bailon, S., Jennings, W. and Lodge, M. (2013) Politics in the boardroom: Corporate pay, networks and recruitment of former parliamentarians, ministers and civil servants in Britain. Politics Studies 61 (4): 850–873.
Gormley, W.T. (1979) A test of the revolving door hypothesis at the FCC. American Journal of Political Science 23 (4): 665–683.
Gray, V. and Lowery, D. (1996) The Population Ecology of Interest Representation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hall, R.L. and Deardorff, A.V. (2006) Lobbying as legislative subsidy. American Political Science Review 100 (1): 69–84.
Halpin, D.R. and Thomas, III H.F. (2012) Evaluating the breadth of policy engagement by organized interests. Public Administration 90 (3): 589–599.
Hansen, J.M. (1991) Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1991-1981. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Heinz, J.P., Laumann, E.O., Nelson, R.L. and Salisbury, R.H. (1993) The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Herring, P. (1929) Group Representation before Congress. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jennings, W. et al (2011) Effects of the core functions of government on the diversity of executive agendas. Comparative Political Studies 44 (8): 1001–1030.
LaPira, T.M. and Thomas, III H.F. (2013) Just how many Newt Gingrich’s are there on K Street? Estimating the true size and shape of Washington’s revolving door. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, IL.
Lazarus, J. and McKay, A. (2012) Consequences of the revolving door: Evaluating the lobbying success of former congressional members and staff. Paper Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference. Chicago, IL.
Leech, B.L. (2013) Lobbyists at Work. New York: Apress Media.
Lessig, L. (2011) Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – And a Plan to Stop It. New York: Twelve Books.
Loomis, B.A. (2007) Does K Street run through Capitol Hill? Lobbying congress in the Republican era. In: A.J. Cigler and B.A. Loomis (eds.) Interest Group Politics, 7th edn. Washington DC: CQ Press, pp. 412–430.
Lowery, D. and Marchetti, K. (2012) You don’t know Jack: Principals, agents, and lobbying. Interest Groups and Advocacy 1 (2): 139–170.
Mansbridge, J. (1992) A deliberative theory of interest representation. In: M.P. Petracca (ed.) The Politics of Interests. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 32–57.
McGuire, K.T. (2000) Lobbyists, revolving doors, and the US Supreme Court. Journal of Law and Politics 16: 113–137.
Milbrath, L.W. (1963) The Washington Lobbyists. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally.
Public Citizen. (2005) Congressional revolving doors: The journey from congress to K Street. Congress Watch (July). Washington DC: Public Citizen.
Quirk, P. (1981) Industry Influence in Federal Regulatory Agencies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Revolving Door Working Group. (2005) A Matter of Trust: How the Revolving Door Undermines Public Confidence in Government – And What to Do About It. Washington DC: The Revolving Door Working Group.
Salisbury, R.H., Johnson, P., Heinz, J.P., Laumann, E.O. and Nelson, R.L. (1989) Who you know versus what you know: The uses of government experience for Washington lobbyists. American Journal of Political Science 33 (1): 175–195.
Schattschneider, E.E. (1960 [1975]) The Semisovereign People. New York: Wadsworth.
Shannon, C.E. (1948) A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27 (3): 379–423.
Washington Post Editorial Board. (2012) Congress’s Revolving Door. Editorial, Washington Post 8 December, http://www.washington.post.com/opinions/congress-revolving-door/2012/12/08/c59de32c-40ae-11e2-a2d9-822f58ac9fd5_story.html.
Yackee, S.W. (2006) Sweet-talking the fourth branch: Assessing the influence of interest group comments on federal agency rulemaking. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 16: 103–124.
Zeigler, H. and Baer, M. (1969) Lobbying: Interactions and Influence in American State Legislatures. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a 2012 American Political Science Association Small Research Grant. We would like to thank James Madison University students Zuleika Lim, Gwen Murtha and Rachel Wein for their assistance and Frank Baumgartner, Lee Drutman, Beth Leech, Sean Lowry and Jacob Straus for comments on previous versions of this article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
LaPira, T., Thomas, H. Revolving door lobbyists and interest representation. Int Groups Adv 3, 4–29 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2013.16
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2013.16