Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process
Marianne Bertrand,
Matilde Bombardini and
Francesco Trebbi
No 16765, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
What do lobbyists do? Some believe that lobbyists' main role is to provide issue-specific information and expertise to congressmen to help guide the law-making process. Others believe that lobbyists mainly provide the firms and other special interests they represent with access to politicians in their "circle of influence" and that this access is the be-all and end-all of how lobbyists affect the lawmaking process. This paper combines a descriptive analysis with more targeted testing to get inside the black box of the lobbying process and inform our understanding of the relative importance of these two views of lobbying. We exploit multiple sources of data covering the period 1999 to 2008, including: federal lobbying registration from the Senate Office of Public Records, Federal Election Commission reports, committee and subcommittee assignments for the 106th to 110th Congresses, and background information on individual lobbyists. A pure issue expertise view of lobbying does not fit the data well. Instead, maintaining connections to politicians appears central to what lobbyists do. In particular, we find that whom lobbyists are connected to (through political campaign donations) directly affects what they work on. More importantly, lobbyists appear to systematically switch issues as the politicians they were previously connected to switch committee assignments, hence following people they know rather than sticking to issues. We also find evidence that lobbyists that have issue expertise earn a premium, but we uncover that such a premium for lobbyists that have connections to many politicians and Members of Congress is considerably larger.
JEL-codes: D72 H7 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)
Published as “Is It Whom You Know Or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process” (joint with Matilde Bombardini and Francesco Trebbi), American Economic Review , Vol. 104, No. 12, December 2014 , (pp. 3885–3920)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16765.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Is It Whom You Know or What You Know? An Empirical Assessment of the Lobbying Process (2014) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:16765
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16765
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().