Policy Consequences of Revolving-Door Lobbying

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231177648
• Author: Amy Melissa McKay,Jeffrey Lazarus
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(4) 1780–1793

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231177648

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Policy Consequences of Revolving-Door

Lobbying

Amy Melissa McKay

1

and Jeffrey Lazarus

2



Abstract

This article presents the f‌irst direct analysis of the inf‌luence of revolving-door lobbyists over the content of adopted

public laws. We use earmarks to evaluate both the effects of lobbying and the possible additional effects of lobbying by

individuals who formerly worked as congressional members and staff. Employing a f‌ixed-effects panel approach, we

evaluate original data describing the lobbying efforts of the more than 5000 accredited U.S. college s and universities over

a 12-year timeframe. Our analysis indicates that schools that lobby in a given year can expect to receive 54% more

earmarks and 24% more earmarked funds relative to other schools and other years. Furthe r, there is an additional

signif‌icant effect of revolving-door lobbying that is greatest at lower levels of lobbying expenditures. Our results

contribute to the emerging literature on comparative lobbying and speak to concerns about the possible corrupting

inf‌luence of revolving-door lobbying over public policy.

Keywords

lobbying, U.S. Congress, interest groups, revolving door, earmarks, pork-barrel politics

A rapidly developing literature has emerged investigating

the nature of the so-called revolving door between gov-

ernment off‌ice holders and interest group lobbyists.

Studies of revolving-door lobbying extend from the

American States (Newmark 2017,Strickland 2020) and

the U.S. Congress (Vidal, Draca, Fons-Rosen 2012,

Makse 2016,LaPira and Thomas 2017,McCrain 2018,

Liu 2020,Shepherd and You 2020,Weschle 2021)to

Europe (Blach-Ørsten, Ida, Pedersen 2017,Cerrillo-i-

Mart´

ınez 2017,Dialer and Richter 2019,Silva 2019,

Luechinger and Moser 2020,Belli and Bursens 2021),

Argentina (Freille et al. 2019), and Australia (Robertson,

Sacks, Miller 2019), among others. Yet despite the con-

siderable attention the phenomenon has attracted, very

few studies measure just how much inf‌luence revolving-

door lobbyists wield. As a result, while many political

actors and observers assume that revolving-door lobbyists

have outsized inf‌luence on policy outcomes, there is very

little direct evidence supporting that conclusion.

Moreover, the effects of lobbying itself are far less

clear than is often assumed. Although a large number of

studies examine the link between lobbying activity and

public policy outcomes (see Bombardini and Trebbi 2020

for a review), threats to methodological inference make it

diff‌icult to draw def‌initive conclusions despite suggestive

empirical relationships.

This article seeks to address these shortcomings in the

literatures on lobbying and revolving-door lobbying by

making two methodological improvements to previous

work. First, our data circumscribe a complete universe of

actors who are transparently interested in a specif‌ic leg-

islative result, only some of which lobby. This sampling

frame helps us avoid the problem of selecting on the

dependent variable, as it is often diff‌icult to identify

entities that are interested in a policy outcome but do not

lobby for or against it (Lowery 2013). Second, because

our dataset covers the same organizations over a 12-year

period, we use f‌ixed effects to control for the (mostly)

time-invariant characteristics of each institution. This

panel data approach builds on studies of the eff‌icacy of

lobbying across institutions (e.g., Apollonio 2005,

Lowery 2007,Dür and Mateo 2012,Schlozman, Verba,

Brady 2012, and Dür, Bernhagen, Marshall 2015)by

1

University of Exeter, UK

2

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jeffrey Lazarus, Department of Political Science, Georgia State

University, P.O. Box 3965, Atlanta, GA 30302, USA.

Email: jlazarus@gsu.edu