How Do Interest Groups Seek Access to Committees?

Abstract

Concerns that interest groups use their financial resources to distort the democratic process are long-standing. Surprisingly, though, firms spend little money on political campaigns, and roughly 95% of publicly traded firms in the United States have never contributed to a political campaign. Do interest groups seek political access through their modest contributions, or are these contributions only a minor and forgettable part of the political process? In this article, we present comprehensive evidence that interest groups are extremely sophisticated in the way they make campaign contributions. We collect a new data set on U.S. state legislative committee assignments and legislator procedural powers from 1988 to 2014, merged with campaign finance data, in order to analyze over 440,000 candidate-committee observations across 99 legislatures. Using a series of difference-in-differences designs based on changes in individual legislators' positions in the legislature, we not only show that interest groups seek out committee members, but we also show that they value what we call indirect access. When a legislator gains procedural powers, interest groups reallocate considerable amounts of money to her. The results reveal how interest groups in a wide range of democratic settings seek to influence the policy process not only by seeking direct access to policy makers but by seeking indirect access to legislative procedure as well.A cademics, pundits, and politicians alike have long considered how interest groups might use their financial resources in an attempt to influence the political process. Despite how politically salient these concerns about campaign finance are, the overall amounts of money that interest groups donate are surprisingly modest. As a fraction of their operating budgets, U.S. corporations donate remarkably small amounts of money to politics, and roughly 95% of publicly traded firms in America have never made a contribution to any candidate in any campaign. 1 These facts suggest to some that interest Alexander Fouirnaies is Assistant Professor,

Who Polices the Administrative State?

“…Third, since Democrats maintained majorities in the House and Senate, all committee turnover will be unrelated to partisan changes in the executive branch. This approach is most similar to recent work by Berry and Fowler (2015), Powell and Grimmer (2016), and Fouirnaies and Hall (2018), which employs similar designs to study district spending and campaign contributions, respectively.…”

Interest Group Activists and the Polarization of State Legislatures

“…Groups seek access to politicians in order to shape policy outcomes (Barber 2016a; Fouirnaies and Hall ; Grimmer and Powell ), but people closely affiliated with these groups can also contribute money directly to candidates. Groups may have a larger effect on legislative behavior indirectly through the contributions of affiliated individuals than they do from the contributions that come directly from the group's legally incorporated PAC and 501(c) organizations.…”

Buying Amendments? Lobbyists' Campaign Contributions and Microlegislation in the Creation of the Affordable Care Act

“…While numerous studies of governments' open consultations with the public have been conducted in the European Union (e.g., Klüver ; Quittkat ; Rasmussen and Alexandrova ; Rasmussen and Carroll ) as well as in US federal agencies (Golden ; Yackee and Yackee ), written comments to congressional committees have never before been analyzed in political science publications (but see Burstein's analysis of witness testimony in congressional committees). Yet doing so is likely to yield significantly different conclusions about the ability of lobbyists to secure their policy preferences: “It's too hard to try to locate the precise policy concessions that each interest group is looking for; these can be quite specific and won't necessarily show up in aggregate measures of policy” (Fouirnaies and Hall ). I use the multiple stages of bill development to test the hypothesis that campaign contributions are more likely to matter under conditions of low visibility in which private benefits are provided unilaterally (relative to conditions of higher visibility, more diffuse benefits, and multilateral agreement).…”