More than Mere Access: An Experiment on Moneyed Interests, Information Provision, and Legislative Action in Congress

• Author: Alexander C. Furnas,Timothy M LaPira,Alexander Hertel-Fernandez,Lee Drutman,Kevin Kosar
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221098743
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(1) 348–364

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129221098743

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More than Mere Access: An Experiment on

Moneyed Interests, Information Provision,

and Legislative Action in Congress

Alexander C. Furnas

1

, Timothy M LaPira

2

, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

3

,

Lee Drutman

4

, and Kevin Kosar

5

Abstract

Campaign donors and corporate interests have greater access to Congress, and the legislative agenda and policy

outcomes reflect their preferences. How this privileged access converts into influence remains unclear because

petitioner-legislator interactions are unobserved. In this article, we report the results of an original survey experiment of

436 congressional staffers. The vignette manipulates a petitioner’s identity, the substance of the request, and the

supporting evidence being offered. We test how likely staff are to take a meeting, to use the information being offered,

and to recommend taking a position consistent with the request, as well as whether they perceive the request to be

congruent with constituent preferences. Donors and lobbyists are no more likely to be granted access than constituents,

but staffers are more likely to use information and to make legislative action recommendatio ns when the information

source is an ideologically aligned think tank. Subgroup analysis suggests these effects are particularly strong among

ideological extremists and strong partisans. And, information offered by aligned think tanks are thought to be rep-

resentative of constituent opinion. Our results reveal the partisan and ideological predispositions that motivate legislative

action that is more costly than merely granting access.

Keywords

congressional staff, lobbying, political information, interest groups, survey experiment

It is well established that wealthy donors and large corpo-

rations gain more access to Congress than average citizens

(Bauer, Sola Pool, and Dexter 1963;Hansen 1991;Langbein

1986;McKay 2018,2020). It is less clear how, or even if,

such privileged access yields legislative action.

Since at least Schattschneider (1960), political scien-

tists have been concerned about elite influence in repre-

sentative institutions. Recently, scholars have focused

more attention on whether out-sized economic resources

afford political actors privileged access and influence in

the policymaking process (Bartels 2008;Bowman 2020;

Gilens 2012;Grossmann and Isaac n.d.;Hacker and

Pierson 2010;Jacobs and Skocpol 2005;Lax et al.

2019;McKay 2018;Schlozman et al. 2012). While

some have questioned the relationship between economic

resources and political clout (Ansolabehere et al. 2003;

Baumgartner et al. 2009;Branham et al. 2017;Enns et al.

2014;McCarty and Rothenberg 1996;Prasad 2018;

Witko et al., 2021), other research has documented that

greater economic resources afford wealthy campaign

donors and private sector businesses more opportunities to

shape public policy (Drutman 2015;Hall and Wayman

1990;Hertel-Fernandez et al. 2018;Miler 2010;Miler

2018;McKay 2012;Kalla and Broockman 2016;Page

and Gilens 2017).

This scholarship has extended to work documenting

how political elites—including state legislators and senior

staff in Congress—misjudge their constituents’opinions

in ways that systematically favor concentrated economic

1

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

2

James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA

3

Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

4

New America, Washington, DC, USA

5

American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alexander C. Furnas, Management and Organizations Department,

Northwestern University, Chambers Hall, Evanston, IL 60208-0814,

USA.

Email: alexander.furnas@kellogg.northwestern.edu

interests (Broockman and Skovron 2018;Hertel-

Fernandez et al. 2019). These studies suggest that the

wealthy and well-organized interests enjoy greater access

because politicians incorrectly believe their self-interests

are congruent with constituents’interests.

Yet, the process by which this unequal access converts to

policy influence is unobserved (McKay 2022). So, we de-

signed an experiment to directly test how much campaign

donors, corporate lobbyists, and consumer group lobbyists

affect legislative action in addition to seeking access alone.

Like similar experiments (Chin et al. 2000;Hertel-

Fernandez et al. 2019;Kalla and Broockman 2016), our

study tests the counterfactual that constituents are less

likely to gain access to congressional offices than donors

and lobbyists. The innovation in our study is to also

measure staffers’likelihood to use information from, or to

side with, the petitioner’s request. Using an original

survey of over 400 DC-based congressional staffers in

2017, the vignette experiment hypothetically requests a

meeting with a member of Congress’s Washington office.

The script varies the identity of the petitioner, whether

they are seeking legislation to be introduced or blocked,

and the nature of the information offered in support of the

request. The outcomes we measure include the likelihood

of taking a meeting, using the information, siding with the

petitioner, and the perception that the petitioner is rep-

resentative of geographic constituent preferences.

Thus, our outcomes measure additional, more nuanced

responses to campaign donors and lobbyists beyond merely

granting access. Seeking and gaining access has long been

considered a prerequisite condition for influencing legislation

(Austen-Smith 1995;Wright 1995). Thus, the experiment is

designed to test whether the cost of granting a constituent,

donor, or lobbyist a meeting is relatively low compared to

other actions in the legislative process. There is anecdotal

evidence that the norm in congressional offices is that

members and staffers should grant meetings with as many

requests as possible as a matter of professional courtesy. For

instance, a senior policy advisor in a House members’office

who was interviewed for this project remarks:

We try to make sure that we do a lot of stakeholder outreach.

The [member of Congress] will tell anybody who’s listening

we have an open door. We’renot gatekeeping in terms of who

gets to come have meetings, who doesn’t. If you reach out

and if we can fit it in, we’re going to set up a meeting for you.

The norm of having a relatively low level of scrutiny to

grant meetings is common. The default to grant access to

nearly anybody who asks is borne out in an interview with

a legislative director in a personal office for a House party

leader. In this interview, the staffer is emphasizing how

unusual the party leaders’personal office operations are

compared to rank-and-file members’offices.

1

It’s a leadership office, and the way we prep our member and

everything we do is in that style. This office is quite possibly one

of the most demanding, and I’ve worked in a lot of different

offices […] [The member of Congress] has a briefing book

every single day. She’s very prepared in what she does. There

are a lot of internal meetings that have to do with her schedule,

making sure that she is where she needs to be. A lot of thought

goes into what meetings that she’s taking, so things just don’t

happen. There are some offices where it’sjustlike,“Well, a

constituent just came in. We’lljust put them on the schedule”or,

“This looks like a good meeting for the member.”None of that.

In this office specifically, we have an actual, legitimate

scheduling process. We call it the rallying process. It’s a form

that staff fill out, and do research, and make sure that this is the

right person that she needs to be speaking with, and why it is.

These comments from senior staff do not necessarily

establish how common it is to grant access or not. But they

do suggest that measuring access alone partly reflects a

meaningful political choice and partly reflects a profes-

sional custom on Capitol Hill.

In addition to professional courtesy, it stands to reason that

the stakes are low when deciding to whom to grant access,

especially among staff hired in part to be the eyes and ears of

members’legislative enterprises (Salisbury and Shepsle

1981). Legislators’time—especially given their limited

presence in Washington—is pressed between committee

meetings, floor voting, fundraising, media appearances, and

other events. Thus, observations of a meeting being granted

offer limited insight into legislative enterprises’choices to

engage in more intense forms of legislative participation (Hall

1998). In this case, the costs for acting after a pitch is made

during a meeting is higher. Costs include the time and effort

to follow through, the reputation risk for recommending the

“wrong”position to take, the potential publicity associated

with advocating on behalf of the interest or policy in question,

and so on. These actions are potentially more transparent to

attentive sub-constituencies, policy stakeholders, journalists,

and real and imagined political rivals. And, acting on an issue

being requested by a petitioner means not acting on hundr eds

of other possible issues, which is primarily what private

interests seek from legislators (Hall and Deardorff 2006).

The cost-benefit distinction between granting access

and then acting on a request is clear from two House chiefs

of staff who were lobbyists themselves prior to working in

Congress. The chief of staff in a majority member’soffice

commented:

I had been [lobbying] for about three or so years, and I

realized I didn’t know what happened when we left a

member’soffice meeting with staff or a member of Congress.

Like, what did they do? How did they make decisions once we,

as a lobbying team, left? Because I’d never worked on the Hill.

Furnas et al. 349