By invitation only: on why do politicians bring interest groups into committees

Vera, Sebastián Vallejo

doi:10.1080/13572334.2021.1905327

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…We posit that when firms engage in pork and perk strategies to influence politicians who oversee the industry-particularly committee chairs-they are more likely to block a bill that is against the interests of firms. As stated above, these influential politicians play a gatekeeping role in the legislative process by bringing a bill to a committee for consideration and dictating debate and voting procedures (Pearson and Schickler 2009, Calvo and Sagarzazu 2011, Lorenz 2020, Vera 2021. They have a prerogative not to pick up a bill for consideration and not to forward it to the full chamber.…”

Section: Market Actions As Cpa and Legislative Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry

Pang,

Funk,

Hirschman

2024

Organization Science

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The literature on corporate political activity (CPA) generally views nonmarket actions aimed at influencing political actors (e.g., lobbying or campaign contributions) as related but separate activities from market actions. This study demonstrates how firms’ core market actions (e.g., market entry or geographic expansion) can function as CPA. We theorize two mechanisms through which firms leverage market actions as CPA: “pork” (i.e., ones that primarily benefit a politician’s constituents) and “perk” (i.e., ones that directly benefit the politician). We document these mechanisms through an empirical analysis of data from the U.S. airline industry in 1990–2019. Specifically, we find that airlines increase the supply of flights from the airports in the home district of the chair of the Transportation Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives (pork). We also find that the airlines increase the supply of nonstop flights to Washington, DC. from the Chair’s district (perk). We use counterfactual estimation methods and exogenous turnovers in committee leadership to provide causal evidence. Moreover, the observed increase in flight supplies is negatively associated with formal policy changes in Congress, and with text mining techniques, we find that this effect is stronger for bills related to aviation safety and security. We contribute to the literature on CPA by demonstrating a blurred boundary between market and nonmarket actions, which helps explain firms’ competitive actions that cannot be explained by market considerations alone. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17026 .

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Section: Market Actions As Cpa and Legislative Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry

Pang,

Funk,

Hirschman

2024

Organization Science

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“…It is worth mentioning that the relevance of committees and chairs is not exclusive to Chile, but it is also present in other countries in Latin America. For instance, Vallejo Vera (2021) shows that legislative committees in the Ecuadorian Congress can control the flow of bill initiatives and the attendance at committee hearings. He also shows how chairs work as gatekeepers of interest group participation.…”

Section: Targeting Legislators: Empirical Regularitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As for Latin America, the literature on interest groups and lobbying is scarce. We add to those recent works that study interest groups in the legislative arenas of Ecuador (Vallejo Vera 2021; Timoneda and Vallejo Vera 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

When Do Interest Groups Lobby Legislators in Strong Presidential Systems?

Dockendorff¹,

Lodato

2023

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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When do interest groups target legislators to approach or lobby under strong presidentialism? This article explores two hypotheses. First, interest groups and lobbyists seek to access committee chairs with gatekeeping power, even in those jurisdictions where the executive holds (most) exclusivity to initiate legislation (Gatekeeping Hypothesis). Second, interest groups and lobbyists target legislators who introduce more bills on issues that concern them but only on policy areas outside the executive's exclusive sphere (Legislative Activity Hypothesis). We test these hypotheses with evidence from the Chilean Chamber of Deputies. We have coded and analysed 6479 lobbying audiences and over 2300 bills.

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“…For instance, scholars have found evidence that donors affect legislators' behavior in committees [12,15,35,44]. More recent work has begun to investigate the relationship of donors to legislative rhetoric, including how donors influence the adoption of suggested legislative text [45,46], the strategic use of interest groups' committee speech to influence legislators' policy positions [47], and the bidirectional relationship between donors and US senators when examining committee discussions on energy policy [48].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Donor activity is associated with US legislators’ attention to political issues

Goel,

Malkin,

Gaynor

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Campaign contributions are a staple of congressional life. Yet, the search for tangible effects of congressional donations often focuses on the association between contributions and votes on congressional bills. We present an alternative approach by considering the relationship between money and legislators’ speech. Floor speeches are an important component of congressional behavior, and reflect a legislator’s policy priorities and positions in a way that voting cannot. Our research provides the first comprehensive analysis of the association between a legislator’s campaign donors and the policy issues they prioritize with congressional speech. Ultimately, we find a robust relationship between donors and speech, indicating a more pervasive role of money in politics than previously assumed. We use a machine learning framework on a new dataset that brings together legislator metadata for all representatives in the US House between 1995 and 2018, including committee assignments, legislative speech, donation records, and information about Political Action Committees. We compare information about donations against other potential explanatory variables, such as party affiliation, home state, and committee assignments, and find that donors consistently have the strongest association with legislators’ issue-attention. We further contribute a procedure for identifying speech and donation events that occur in close proximity to one another and share meaningful connections, identifying the proverbial needles in the haystack of speech and donation activity in Congress which may be cases of interest for investigative journalism. Taken together, our framework, data, and findings can help increase the transparency of the role of money in politics.

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By invitation only: on why do politicians bring interest groups into committees

Cited by 8 publications

References 58 publications

We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry

We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry

When Do Interest Groups Lobby Legislators in Strong Presidential Systems?

Donor activity is associated with US legislators’ attention to political issues

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