When Do Interest Groups Use Electronic Rulemaking?

This paper analyzes how electronic rulemaking is affecting the propensity of interest groups to file comments and replies at the Federal Communications Commission. The paper shows that exogenous events and a handful of issues drive filing behavior. Implications of the analysis are discussed

Lobbying and Information in Politics

The vast majority of papers written about interest groups ’ political in uence focuses on the role of money in politics. Business and interest groups ’ partici-pation in campaign nance, in the form of hard and soft money, has been the subject of hundreds of theoretical and empirical studies. Moreover, with the recent congressional moves to reform campaign nance laws, campaign nance studies have received a prominent position in public discourse. There are two striking results about this line of academic work. First, political action committees (PACs) gave $245 million to congressional candidates in form of campaign contributions in the 1999–2000 election cycle (about$123 million annually), and corporations, unions, and interest groups gave $153 million in “soft money ” to political parties during the 1997–1998 election cycle (about$76 million annually).1 Yet, Congress controls a $2 trillion budget, nearly 40 percent of which is discretionary spending. This raises a potential puzzle: why do interest groups pay so little ($200 million annually) to try to in uence policy? To answer this question, we turn to a second striking result from the academi

Committee Jurisdiction, Congressional Behavior and Policy Outcomes

The literature on congressional committees has largely overlooked the impact of jurisdictional fights on policy proposals and outcomes. This paper develops a theory of how legislators balance the benefits of expanded committee jurisdiction against preferred policy outcomes. It shows why a) senior members and young members in safe districts are most likely to challenge a committee’s jurisdiction; b) policy proposals may be initiated off the proposer’s ideal point in order to obtain jurisdiction; c) policy outcomes will generally be more moderate with jurisdictional fights than without these turf wars. We empirically investigate these results examining proposed Internet intellectual property protection legislation in the 106th Congress

The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation

One of the central concerns about American policy making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions - legislative, administrative, and legal - is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strategies of groups. In this paper we examine in a formal theoretical model how the opportunity to litigate administrative rulemaking in the courts affects the lobbying strategies of competing interest groups at the rulemaking stage. Using a resource-based view of group activity, we develop a number of important insights about each stage that cannot be observed by examining each one in isolation. We demonstrate that lobbying effort responds to the ideology of the court, and the responsiveness of the court to resources. In particular, (1) as courts become more biased toward the status quo, interest group lobbying investments become smaller, and may be eliminated all together, (2) as interest groups become wealthier, they spend more on lobbying, and (3) as the responsiveness of courts to resources decreases, the effect it has on lobbying investments depends on the underlying ideology of the court

The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation

One of the central concerns about American policy-making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions - legislative, administrative, and legal is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strategies of groups. In this paper we examine in a formal theoretical model, how the opportunity to litigate administrative rulemaking in the courts affects the lobbying strategies of competing interest groups at the rulemaking stage. Using a resource-based view of group activity, we develop a number of important insights about each stage - which cannot be observed by examining each one in isolation. We demonstrate that lobbying effort responds to the ideology of the court, and the responsiveness of the court to resources. In particular, 1) as courts become more biased toward the status quo, interest group lobbying investments become smaller, and may be eliminated all together, 2) as interest groups become wealthier, they spend more on lobbying, and 3) as the responsiveness of courts to resources decreases, the effect it has on lobbying investments depends on the underlying ideology of the court.

The Timing, Intensity, and Composition of Interest Group Lobbying: An Analysis of Structural Policy Windows in the States

This is the first paper to statistically examine the timing of interest group lobbying. It introduces a theoretical framework based on recurring structural policy windows' and argues that these types of windows should have a large effect on the intensity and timing of interest group activity. Using a new database of all lobbying expenditures in the U.S. states ranging up to 25 years, the paper shows interest group lobbying increases substantially during one of these structural windows in particular--the budgeting process. Spikes in lobbying during budgeting are driven primarily by business groups. Moreover, even groups relatively unaffected by budgets lobby more intensely during legislative budgeting, consistent with the theory that these interests are attempting to have legislators attach (de)regulatory riders to the budget bills. Overall, the paper demonstrates that these structural policy windows largely determine lobbying expenditures.

Advancing the Empirical Research on Lobbying

This essay identifies the empirical facts about lobbying which are generally agreed upon in the literature. It then discusses challenges to empirical research in lobbying and provides examples of empirical methods that can be employed to overcome these challenges—with an emphasis on statistical measurement, identification, and casual inference. The essay then discusses the advantages, disadvantages, and effective use of the main types of data available for research in lobbying. It closes by discussing a number of open questions for researchers in the field and avenues for future work to advance the empirical research in lobbying

Congressional Control of the Courts: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Expansion of the Federal Judiciary

Congress has many available tools to influence the federal judiciary. In this article, we consider Congress\u27 ability to balance, or stack, the courts through the creation of federal judgeships. While caseload pressure often produces the need for more judgeships, we demonstrate that political party alignment between Congress and the president often determines the timing of the judicial expansion. The net effect of expanding during political alignment is to speed up changes in the political balance of the judiciary in favor of the current Congress. We also examine the determinants of expansion size and show that both political alignment and caseload pressure influence Congress\u27 decision regarding how many judgeships to add