Executive Summary
Gauging the influence of organized interests in the American legislative process is undeniably a difficult undertaking. Interest groups and their lobbyists have little incentive to publicly reveal their goals and the extent of their efforts in pursuing those goals. Nationally, and in most states, lobbyists and interest groups are only required to publicly report their lobbying expenditures and the general policy areas in which they are interested in. Thus, it is extremely difficult to assess whether groups are successful in advocating for or against a particular bill. However, a few states have recently begun to require lobbyists and organized interests engaged in lobbying to report each specific bill they have lobbied and, in Wisconsin, whether they support or oppose the bill. These enhanced reporting requirements allow for a more systematic assessment of interest group influence in the legislative process. This study exploits this new data to address the question of lobbying efficacy by examining the outcomes of a random sample of bills introduced in the Wisconsin state legislature during the 2007–2008 session. By looking systematically at the extent to which lobbying and advocacy efforts affect the outcomes of introduced legislation, the analyses are able to show that these efforts, contrary to some of the recent research, have significant effects. Although contextual factors remain important, this study shows that advocacy efforts are influential in their own right. In addition, the analyses of this unique data reveal that several types of interest group activities (for example, campaign contributions) vary in their degree of influence at different points in the legislative process.
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Notes
The sample excludes the budget bill and joint resolutions that require extraordinary majorities to pass.
Here is the full distribution of bill outcomes: (i) died in first chamber committee – 145 bills; (ii) passed first chamber committee – 56 bills; (iii) passed first chamber – 48 bills; (iv) passed second chamber committee – 10 bills; (v) passed legislature – 41 bills.
In alternative specifications, bill salience – as measured by newspaper coverage – was also interacted with the various measures of lobbying efforts, as suggested by Grasse and Heidbreder (2011). These interactions did not reveal any significant differences in the effects of lobbying efforts on ‘salient’ compared with ‘non-salient’ issues.
Project Vote Smart provides a searchable database of officials’ public statements at www.votesmart.org. This search was cross-check with the news coverage of bills.
Only 10 bills passed the second chamber committee and did not pass. In order to simplify the interpretation of the models, these 10 bills were included in the category of bills that passed the first chamber, but did not progress further. Alternative models, using a full 5-point scale do produce any appreciable difference in results.
Spending on lobbying is correlated with hours spent lobbying at 0.8 and higher. The correlations between the number of groups and lobbying activities, however, are much lower and show no evidence of creating serious collinearity problems.
The effects of campaign contributions from the first two models produce similar patterns. The x-axis in both graphs is presented on a logged scale.
The effects of campaign contribution advantages from Models 4 and 5 are similar, though slightly smaller in magnitude.
Alternative specifications that excluded bills with campaign contributions from opposition groups produced very similar results.
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Lewis, D. Advocacy and influence: Lobbying and legislative outcomes in Wisconsin. Int Groups Adv 2, 206–226 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2013.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2013.5