Does Lobbying Affect Bill Advancement? Evidence from Three State Legislatures

• Author: Daniel M. Butler,David R. Miller
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211012481
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211012481

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211012481

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Whether organized interests’ lobbying efforts affect pol-

icy outcomes is a contested issue.1 Some studies of lob-

bying and policymaking provide evidence that lobbying

influences political actors’ behavior (Bergan 2009; Hall

and Miler 2008) and final policy outcomes (Anzia and

Moe 2015; Grasse and Heidbreder 2011; Grossmann and

Pyle 2013). Because some constituencies in the popula-

tion, such as businesses and the upper class, are better

represented by organized interests, some scholars con-

clude that lobbying leads to outcomes that favor those

privileged constituencies (Gilens and Page 2014;

Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012). Furthermore,

because lobbying is thought to reinforce the status quo in

public policy, (Baumgartner et al. 2009), the efficacy of

lobbying may empower the privileged to block policy

changes favored by the public at large (Gerber 1999;

Gray et al. 2010). However, other studies suggest that

lobbying has a limited effect on political officials’ actions

(Wawro 2001) and government outputs (Baumgartner

et al. 2009; Lewis 2013), thus tempering the normative

concerns expressed about lobbying’s pernicious effects

(Bashir 2015; Enns 2015). Given these conflicting con-

clusions concerning the effectiveness of lobbying, it is

difficult for scholars and practitioners to substantiate

claims about its normative consequences and offer reform

proposals that improve the responsiveness of government

to the polity at large.

One challenge to understanding whether and how lob-

bying influences policy outcomes is data scarcity about

the positions that organized interests take on bills (Anzia

2019; Leech 2010). While scholars can sometimes com-

pile this information for a subset of bills, they rarely ana-

lyze the full set of bills considered before a legislature.

Consequently, scholars “often focus only on issues that

reach the end stages of the policy process or that are well

published” because data is more accessible for these

issues, making it difficult to draw generalizations because

these issues “simply are not representative of what typi-

cally occurs” (Baumgartner et al. 2009, 2).

We offer new insights into the relationship between

lobbying and policymaking by using lobbying disclosure

data from three U.S. states that provide information not

available for commonly studied institutions, such as

Congress (Anzia 2019). Specifically, Colorado, Nebraska,

and Wisconsin require organized interests to report the

bills on which they lobby and the positions they take on

those bills, allowing us to examine the relationship

1012481PRQXXX10.1177/10659129211012481Political Research QuarterlyButler and Miller

research-article2021

1University of California San Diego, USA

2Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Daniel M. Butler, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman

Drive, San Diego, CA 92093, USA.

Email: daniel.butler@gmail.com

Does Lobbying Affect Bill Advancement?

Evidence from Three State Legislatures

Daniel M. Butler1 and David R. Miller2

Abstract

Many studies consider the effect of lobbying on the behavior of individual legislators, but few studies demonstrate a

relationship between lobbying and the ultimate dispositions of bills by the legislature. One challenge to establishing

this latter relationship is data scarcity, as few legislatures systematically collect and publish information on organized

interests’ lobbying activities on each bill. We provide new insights on lobbying by using data from Colorado, Nebraska,

and Wisconsin that records the positions organized interests take on proposals in those states’ legislatures. We find

that organized interests’ lobbying predicts outcomes, especially when lobbying is directed against a proposal. We also

use our data to test whether lobbying succeeds by building support among legislators (i.e., vote buying) or by affecting

a proposal’s advancement through the legislative process (i.e., agenda control). We find that lobbying does not buy the

votes of legislators on the committees of jurisdiction for each bill, but lobbying does strongly predict what bills make

it onto the agenda. Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions about money and politics, bias in representation,

and legislator behavior.

Keywords

lobbying, agenda control, state legislatures, vote buying

2022, Vol. 75(3) 547–561

Article