Executive Summary
Interest groups often attempt to influence congressional legislation through lobbying. We study more than 17 000 bills introduced in both houses of the 106th and 107th Congresses, including more than 3500 associated with reported lobbying. We analyze the determinants of interest group lobbying on particular bills and provide initial tests of the relationship between lobbying and the advancement of legislation through committee and floor passage. We find that the incidence and amount of interest group lobbying is associated with majority party sponsorship, extensive co-sponsorship and high-profile issues. Lobbying is also associated with whether bills advance through committee and each chamber, independent of congressional factors typically associated with bill advancement.
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Notes
An online transcript is available at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Destiny_of_Our_Own_Making, accessed 2 February 2011.
These data are compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics from the Senate Office of Public Records. Updated data are available online at http://www.opensecrets.org.
For a literature review, see Wawro (2001).
Appropriations bills were identified by searching bill titles for the strings ‘making appropriations’, ‘making supplemental appropriations’, ‘emergency supplemental appropriations’, ‘making miscellaneous appropriations’, and ‘supplemental appropriations’ only in the case of the post-September 11 supplemental appropriations bills. Bills with explicit policy ends were not flagged as appropriations bills.
Results were substantially similar if all bills are included in the analysis. With appropriations bills included in the models, ideological distance from the party and chamber median are statistically significant more often; co-sponsors and pro-interest group coalitions are significant less often. Yet no coefficient estimates changed substantially.
The project was supported by National Science Foundation grants #00880066 and #00880061. The information that we used is made publicly available at http://congressionalbills.org. We sincerely thank E. Scott Adler and John Wilkerson for making this information publicly available. The views expressed are those of the authors and not the National Science Foundation.
Congressional Bills Project data do not appear to account for changes in party control during the 107th Senate. On 6 June 2001, James Jeffords switched from caucusing with the Republicans to the Democrats, shifting the majority party and leading to a power-sharing agreement and a shift in committee leadership.
For our analyses of bill advancement, we also ran models using dummies measuring bill topic for each of the PAP categories to account for systematic differences across bills of differing content. These results are not presented here, as the general findings are similar.
For the 106th Congress, we modified Congressional Bills Project data for cases where a member changed committee membership in the midst of a term. Bills are given a 1 only when a bill was introduced during the Member's tenure on that committee. Members who spent the entire term on a committee are given 1s for all bills referred to that committee regardless of their starting date. We made no modification to Congressional Bills Project data for the 107th Congress.
Without pooling the two Congresses, we obtained substantially similar results. Though several of the variables in these models are dichotomous, collinearity was not a major concern; most of these variables were of low frequency and were largely independent of one another.
In the 106th and 107th Houses, 1140 bills were considered under this rule (Carr, 2005, p. 10), of which only around 60 per cent were reported from committee (Carr, 2005, p. 4). Such bills generally pass (only 12 failed in votes during the period of this study) (Carr, 2005, p. 11).
We depart from conventional reporting of zero-inflated regressions, which typically includes binary coefficients that correspond with models to predict whether cases will receive a count of zero. This convention confusingly makes positive values indicate lower levels of lobbying. In the models reported here, positive coefficients in both models indicate greater levels of lobbying.
The project website lists all bills associated with each of the issues they cover. To connect bills to lobbying activities, we used Table A.1 of the Appendix in Baumgartner et al (2009), where the authors divide every policy issue they cover into the specific areas where they located proponents or opponents. The project was supported by National Science Foundation grants #SBR-9905195 for the period of 1999 and 2000 and #SES-0111224 for the period of 2001–2003. The information that we used is made publicly available at http://lobby.la.psu.edu. We sincerely thank Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David Kimball and Beth Leech for publicly sharing their data. The views expressed are those of the authors and not the National Science Foundation.
Lobbying took place around the main issue in these pieces of legislation, therefore, but did not necessarily involve attempts by interest groups to specifically reference the bill numbers. Baumgartner et al (2009) do not assemble a complete list of issues on which groups were lobbying. They called lobbyists and asked each person for the first issue on which they were working. Within the sample, the House had 327 bills with lobbying in favor and 262 bills with lobbying against; the Senate had 217 bills with lobbying in favor and 171 with lobbying against.
Within this sample, the House had 44 bills with a supportive interest group endorsement and 21 bills with reported interest group opposition; the Senate had 61 bills with a supportive endorsement and 7 bills with reported opposition.
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Grossmann, M., Pyle, K. Lobbying and congressional bill advancement. Int Groups Adv 2, 91–111 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2012.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2012.18