Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Dynamics of Intergovernmental Lobbying.

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary In the U.S., nearly 90,000 local governments employ 11 million workers and are responsible for delivering essential public services. Many of these local governments use a portion of their public funds to hire lobbyists to represent them both before the federal government and their state capitals. They seek grant money and favorable policies that will increase their power, autonomy, and institutional flexibility. However, the interest group literature on lobbying has largely neglected this phenomenon, and as a result we know little about the causes and consequences of intergovernmental lobbying. The investigator asks: What explains variation in lobbying efforts by local governments, and is spending money on lobbyist representation a good investment? The investigator develops a theory that intergovernmental lobbying is a way for local governments to compensate for weak representation by higher-level officials. She uses lobbying expenditure reports, local political and demographic information, and public finance data to demonstrate which local governments lobby and what they get as a result of these lobbying activities. Technical Summary The investigator constructs an original longitudinal dataset on local government lobbying in all 50 states. While local governments also lobby the federal government, the majority of their efforts are targeted towards their state capitals, given the unique authority that states have to restructure local units financially, administratively, and politically. Although federal lobbying data is readily available as a result of the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, there exists no publically available composite dataset of state-level lobbying expenditures. This lack of centralized data has become increasingly problematic as lobbying at the state level has soared over the past decade, often outpacing national lobbying efforts. Panel data on intergovernmental lobbying across states will allow the investigator to employ several strategies to identify the correlates of local government lobbying and estimate the effects of this behavior. Initial evidence from California using a fixed effects approach and over a decade of data on city lobbying and finance shows that cities allocate more money to lobbying when they receive a new state assembly member, and spending more on lobbying leads cities to secure more discretionary funding from the state. However, institutional variables at the state level are likely key to explain variation in local government lobbying efforts and outcomes. This project contributes to the theoretical literature on interest groups and fiscal federalism by providing new empirical evidence on the way in which local governments use intergovernmental lobbying to compete with each other to provide services for their residents.