Executive Summary
Members of Congress grant access to outsiders as a means of alleviating uncertainty over policies and elections. For those seeking access to Congress, a key factor determining their success is the appearance of usefulness, namely, the perceived ability to provide a Member of Congress with some resource that he or she desires. These resources come in a variety of forms, including votes, campaign contributions, policy expertise and public credibility. Given these assumptions, who is granted access to Congress, and which members are more likely to grant it? Previous studies have found a direct relationship between organization or Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions and access to Members of Congress, measured by the amount of contact. Some have gone a step further, finding that, while PACs play an indisputable role in access, the real driver is constituency, or at least salience to the district or state from which the Member of Congress hails. Here, we present the results of an experiment conducted in the spring and summer of 2010, in which one of the authors called the offices of each member of the Senate, first as a private citizen and then as a registered federal lobbyist, and requested a meeting with each senator to discuss a health care bill that had been languishing in committee for some time. Unsurprisingly, the registered lobbyist experienced a clear advantage over the ordinary citizen, securing 27 meetings compared to just 7 as a citizen. The lobbyist was granted more access in other measurable categories, although party affiliation or campaign contributions had little effect. While previous studies have found strong PAC contribution and constituency effects on access, one important fact stands out from our experience: only 8 of the 100 Senate offices asked whether the lobbyist had an interest in the senator’s state, and only 4 of the 27 who granted meetings did so. Perhaps the assumption that a lobbyist, whether in- or out-of-state, is a potential source of campaign funds is strong enough to override the constituency effect, but we found no compelling evidence that membership on relevant committees or a past reliance on health sector or lobbyist contributions drove access. Rather, it appears as if ‘lobbyist’ simply works as a magic word when requesting access to a Member of Congress, with power beyond the borders of a state or district. Although the results of our experiment are limited, they do suggest that several questions about citizen and lobbyist access to Congress remain and need to be addressed, especially given the normative assumption that Members of Congress should represent the people they serve.
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Notes
This experiment was crafted and carried out independently by Josh Brodbeck, a political consultant not affiliated with an academic institution. As such, the experiment did not go through an Institutional Review Board process. If the reader harbors any ethical concerns about the experiment, see Chin et al (2000) – an experiment involving Congressional staffers – and Gerber and Green (2000) – a study involving registered voters in which the subjects of the experiment were not volunteers aware of their participation.
The research design was developed in consultation with two outside sources of assistance: a veteran lobbyist and a federal legislative analyst. The veteran lobbyist has represented clients from various industries and sectors for over 20 years. The federal legislative analyst is employed by an industry-funded non-profit organization and interacts with US Senate offices on a daily basis. For obvious reasons, both individuals asked not to be identified in this study. These individuals can be confidentially verified on request.
Although meeting requests were made with actual senators, if a meeting were to be granted it was always assumed that it would be with a member of the senator’s staff. On the basis of the input of the two individuals consulted in advance of this study, and with a desire to adhere to the purity of the intent of this study (measuring the level of direct access to a senator and/or a senator’s office based on one’s status – citizen versus lobbyist), it was most appropriate for the meeting requests to be made with the senators themselves, with the understanding that such requests would very likely be immediately turned over to Senate staff if they were granted.
To avoid chances of diminishing the credibility of the study, an actual company granted permission for its name to be used. The company had a logical interest in S. 702. The company requested that it not be identified, although it can be confidentially verified on request.
We have redacted the lobbyist registration number, as it could be used in concert with a federal lobbyist database, a publicly accessible database managed by congressional staff, to reveal the identity of the actual company named in the lobbyist contacts. This number can be confidentially verified on request. Although a request to provide identifying information to verify official federal lobbyist registration was conceived as a possibility within the study, not once during the study did a Senate office actively request such identifying information.
All information on S.702 was drawn from the Library of Congress database at www.thomas.loc.gov.
All information on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was drawn from the Library of Congress database at www.thomas.loc.gov.
Appendices A, B, , C, D and E provide additional descriptive information about the experiment.
Appendix F provides summary statistics for the logit models.
One potential means of reworking the experiment to account for constituency could include calling Senate offices from area codes within the home states of the senators, but this carries its own ethical concerns.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington. We thank our fellow participants on the panel and those in attendance for their constructive feedback.
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Appendices
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Appendix E
Appendix F
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Brodbeck, J., Harrigan, M. & Smith, D. Citizen and lobbyist access to Members of Congress: Who gets and who gives?. Int Groups Adv 2, 323–342 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2013.11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2013.11