Abstract
Most lobbying studies focus on the legislative branch, yet lobbyists often target the executive and judicial branches as well. In this paper, we explore similarities and differences in lobbying the executive and judicial branches, as well as multi-venue lobbying in Washington, D.C. and the states. Data are derived from two large surveys conducted contemporaneously in 35 states and in Washington. Our findings offer insight into how both lobbyist/organization type and context shape the choices and number of venues that lobbyists target. We also weigh in on several questions regarding the behavior of advantaged versus disadvantaged groups and the effects of conflict, competition, and group power. We find that the effects of conflict, the number of coalitions a lobbyist’s group joins, and organizational power are similar in the states as they are in Washington. However, factors like lobbying experience and lobbyist/organization type appear subtly different at different levels of government.
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Notes
While not all grass-roots lobbyists and their organizations are disadvantaged, on average, they are likely disadvantaged compared to better-resourced contract lobbyists.
We realize that contract lobbyists represent multiple organizations, so we ask lobbyists to answer pertaining to the organization in which the lobby the most (Online Appendix, Table A3). While imperfect, we believe this is valid since it captures the work that the lobbyists engage in the most. We use similar wording used by Newmark and Nownes (2023) in their study of lobbying at different stages of the legislative process.
There are differences in the way data were collected for years of experience across the two surveys. For the state survey, respondents entered in the number of years they had lobbied. The Washington survey utilized a drop-down list of years.
The Cronbach’s alpha for each index ranges from 0.8 to 0.9.
Respondents were asked to report whether they attempt to influence each branch, so the numbers indicate the percentage that “lobby” a given branch. The numbers reflect that some organizational representatives who are registered to lobby do not engage directly with lawmakers. This could mean that they do research, public outreach, or they focus on other branches of government. We include these individuals because they work for firms that lobby, and excluding them creates a false picture of the individuals who are registered, possibly ignoring those who engage in outside lobbying. These numbers also reflect all respondents who answered these questions and do not include those who did not complete enough questions to be included in the multivariate analyses. Nearly all the lobbyists in the sample report lobbying at least one branch of government; over ninety percent of those in the multivariable analysis lobby the legislative branch.
We dropped some of the variables in some models if the variables contributed nothing to the model and the full specification did not fit the data well (we tested model fit in several ways including comparisons of AIC and BIC and Hosmer-Lemeshow tests). This makes sense given that what explains lobbying the executive branch may be different from what explains lobbying the judiciary. The more parsimonious models also maximize the number of cases, since not all questions were applicable to every respondent. All models were also estimated with all variables. Most of the key predictors do not change substantially, but these models poorly fit.
As a basis for comparison, we also estimated models using whether the lobbyist lobbied the legislative branch as a dependent variable. This was problematic since most lobbyists lobby the legislature and certain variables like “contract lobbyists" perfectly predict the dependent variable. Our goal was not to predict legislative lobbying, so the models are poorly specified. For comparisons, see Online Appendix, Table A4.
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Newmark, A.J., Nownes, A.J. Searching for avenues of influence: multi-branch and multi-level lobbying in Washington, D.C. and the States. Int Groups Adv 13, 20–42 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-023-00198-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-023-00198-z