Research

Do bipartisan contributions by corporations and trade associations reflect strategic considerations or ideological moderation? In this paper, I leverage lobbying disclosures in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin to provide a new measure of ideology that allows me to adjudicate between the two accounts. These states’ legislatures permit or require lobbyists to declare their principals’ positions on lobbied bills. I combine these data with roll call votes to estimate the ideal points of legislators and private interests in the same ideological space. I find that the revealed preferences of most corporations and trade groups are more conservative than what would be implied by their contribution behavior. The discrepancies are particularly acute for high-level contributors. This shows that a moderate contribution record need not imply moderation in policy preferences. Thus, such interests may not reduce polarization overall. Further, the divergence between contribution and position-taking behavior indicates that many business interests employ sophisticated strategies to influence public officials whom they disagree with.

Tests of legislative gatekeeping theories have been hampered by the absence of status quo estimates, making these tests vulnerable to selection bias. I overcome this problem with a novel data set on positions by private interests in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, because these states’ legislatures record organizations’ positions on lobbied bills irrespective of whether the bills receive floor consideration. This permits an estimation of the ideological locations of status quo policies for bills with and without floor consideration, and in turn rigorous empirical tests of agenda control theories. The data provide substantial evidence of partisan and nonpartisan gatekeeping, and can adjudicate among the two models of gatekeeping in specific circumstances. In particular, they corroborate partisan gatekeeping in the Iowa House and the Wisconsin Assembly, and cannot distinguish between the two accounts in the other chambers. Moreover, the results show that strong partisan institutions need not result in predominantly partisan gatekeeping.

Why do candidates rely on fundraising event attendees to finance their campaigns? Despite public concerns around this mode of donation, fundraising events have received little scholarly attention. We use a source of novel data — campaign finance disclosures in four U.S. states which indicate event- and non-event status of donations linked to political candidates — to examine two hypotheses. First, events help candidates draw on individual donors’ non-ideological motivations, including material motivations. Second, events help candidates fundraise when ideological motivations are relatively low. We provide evidence that donors discount ideology when they attend events, and link agenda powers of legislative incumbents to increases in event donations, including from individuals in related business sectors. Further, we show that early donations from individuals are more likely to be made via events than later donations, especially for incumbents. Our results highlight implications of event fundraising for responsiveness, partisan polarization, and candidate selection.

Lobbying expenditures are widely used as a proxy variable for measuring lobbying activity. However, the validity of this approach has rarely been examined and existing justifications do not account for heterogeneity in lobbyist compensation formats. I address the question using unique lobbying disclosure data from Wisconsin, where lobbying organizations report both hours worked and payments received by their lobbyists. Strong overall correlations between changes in expenditures and hours worked within organization-lobbyist dyads indicate that lobbying expenditures can serve as a reasonable proxy. However, caution is warranted due to substantial heterogeneity, with contract lobbyist relationships exhibiting weaker correlations than in-house relationships. I conclude by providing several suggestions to improve empirical analyses using lobbying expenditures.

Trade associations provide a crucial channel for the transmission of elite public opinion about the advisability of certain policies. They are also by reputation and according to observable metrics some of the most important and influential lobbying organizations. But whose interests do trade associations represent, and why, among their members? By linking IRS non-profit tax records, data from the encyclopedia of associations, and biographical information from BoardEx, we conduct a study inspired by Dahl’s famous “Who Governs?” to examine consequences of turnover in corporate representation on association’s boards for political behavior, focusing on lobbying. Our preliminary findings suggest that, on average, firms shape association policy when they join the board of the association. Second, we find that the effect is larger among associations that have oligarchic characteristics – a stronger hierarchy and holdover board members – and for larger firms. This is consistent with the idea that those associations use an oligarchical governance structure.

We combine data from campaign finance filings in three U.S. states which indicate event- and non-event status of individual donations linked to candidacies, L2 data, and survey data to explore consequences of event fundraising for candidate selection and responsiveness. As fundraising events give donors face time with politicians, politicians may become broadly responsive to their policy views, leading to skewed responsiveness if event donors are unrepresentative of constituents. Regarding selection, because events provide a local signal of candidate support that can serve a coordinating function, event donors may help to coordinate on primary nominees similarly to party-linked donors. Preliminary evidence suggests that event donors are similarly central primary donor networks for state legislative races as donors that contribute to party committees. Moreover, we find that event donors are richer, more likely to be male and white than non-event donors. Finally, on economically salient issues, event donors, unlike non-event donors, are more likely to be aligned with their member of Congress than non-donors.

We test the theoretical prediction of political business cycle theories that private consumption will increase before an election as a result of politically-induced expansions, and examine how the effects are moderated by central bank independence. Since previous research has not substantiated this prediction, we focus on non-durable consumption where any effects should be strongest. Moreover, we conduct several robustness checks to account for the possibility of endogenous elections. Using data from a panel of OECD countries across more than three decades, we find support for the hypothesis of a pre-electoral increase among the subset of country-year observations in which central bank independence is low.

What are the ideological positions of private interests? Valid measurements of interest group and legislator preferences on the same scale enable a closer examination of the role of private interests in the legislative process. In this paper, I exploit lobbying disclosure requirements in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin to provide a new measure of interest group ideology. These states’ legislatures either permit or require lobbyists to declare their principals’ positions on lobbied bills. I combine these data with roll call votes and candidate survey responses to estimate, via an item-response model, the ideal points of legislators and interest groups in the same space. Although the interest groups’ position-based ideal points correlate strongly with contribution-based measures, there is more extremism in the former, which is primarily driven by conservative-leaning groups. In addition to providing a new measure of interest group ideology, the analysis suggests that private interests, including corporations and trade groups, cannot be ruled out as a source of partisan polarization.

Does divided or unified government have an effect on lobbying expenditures by special interests, and does the type of governmental regime – divided government, unified Democratic government, or unified Republican government – affect the lobbying efforts of special interests who tend to be aligned with one party over another? While empirical accounts of lobbying in Congress and at the state-level emphasize that lobbying activity is not primarily driven by characteristics of the political environment, there are theoretical accounts which predict that divided government should increase aggregate lobbying, and that the “friendliness” of a governmental regime towards certain types of special interests will affect lobbying efforts. To address whether the type of governmental regime affects lobbying expenditures, we employ lobbying expenditure data from 29 states and a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that accounts for the multiple elections that produce unified or divided government. Based on our preliminary estimates, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no causal effect of divided government on overall or corporate lobbying expenditures. While some of the preliminary estimates for labor unions, corporations, and trade groups show a decrease under unified Republican control, the results call for the inclusion of additional data as well as robustness checks ahead of a substantive interpretation of these estimates.

Why do Congressional candidates chose to emphasize certain issues over others, and when will candidates change their issue emphasis from the primary to the general election campaigns? Existing theories of issue selection tend to focus on general election campaigns. This includes accounts in which issue selection is driven by the need to signal a broader preference alignment to the electorate. Moreover, while the are many formal theories of two-stage elections, they tend to assume a single-dimension on which it is either not possible or costly to flip-flop. I argue that candidates can use issue selection and issue emphasis to change their perceived position on a broad spectrum of unmentioned topics, including the main dimension of political conflict, without changing their positions on any issues. Based on this account, I derive the hypothesis that extreme primary candidates are more likely to change the issues they emphasize between the primary and general election campaigns. Using a regression discontinuity design, I test the hypothesis with data on issue mentions in campaign TV ads of candidates running for U.S. House or U.S. Senate from 2000 through 2014. I find strong support for the hypothesis among Democratic candidates. In addition, the results provide evidence that Republican moderates are more likely to change the issues they emphasize.

Do state governments in the U.S. politicize the administration of disaster recovery funding to local governments? Local governments rely on the federal and state governments to receive crucial financial assistance in recovering from disasters. Previous research has provided mixed evidence on whether presidents are motivated by electoral or partisan considerations in declaring disasters or awarding grants. However, little research has focused on the partisanship of grant applicants such as local governments, and the potential for politicization at the state level. In this paper, I address this question with data on federally obligated Public Assistance grants and transfers of obligated grants to local governments in Louisiana. Further, I leverage the as-if random assignment of gubernatorial and mayoral partisanship in close races in a regression discontinuity design to estimate a causal effect of having a co-partisan president or governor on the amount of grants obligated or received. To extend the analysis beyond close races, I also conduct a series of fixed- and random-effects panel regressions. Preliminary results from panel regressions provide some evidence of partisan politicization on behalf of the state government. In particular, having the local government executive be a co-partisan of the governor has a positive and statistically significant association with the amount of grant dollars awarded on highly salient projects.

What are the determinants of PACs’ contributions and when do they contribute strategically? Measuring the ideology of private interests using lobbyist declarations (see above) provides a measure of preference proximity between these interests and legislators that is not directly based on campaign contributions. I combine these measures with data on campaign contributions and legislator covariates to analyze the extent to which similar policy preferences, as opposed to non-spatial characteristics determine PACs’ contributions to candidates. I find that contributions by corporations and trade groups are motivated by access to legislators who lead relevant committees, but not by ideological proximity. In addition, I find that corporations and trade groups contribute to seek direct access to legislators who they disagree with ideologically. Moreover, the results show that ideological and single-issue groups, labor unions, as well as professional groups exhibit ideological motivations in their contribution behavior. The results imply substantial heterogeneity in the motivations of organizations to contribute and caution against using the contribution behavior of many corporations and trade groups to estimate these interests’ ideological positions.