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

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 recommendations 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 representative of constituent opinion. Our results reveal the partisan and ideological predispositions that motivate legislative action that is more costly than merely granting access.

The people think what I think: False consensus and unelected elite misperception of public opinion

“…For instance, Miler (2010) shows that congressional staffers systematically recall subconstituen-cies like donors and activists as most representative of constituent preferences, even though they are preference outliers. And, Furnas et al (2022) find that staffers rate petitioners who use ideologically aligned legislative subsidy information as particularly representative of constituents. Therefore, we suspect that legislators and legislative staff regularly interact with subconstituency sources like donors and lobbyists that tend to skew conservative (Crosson, Furnas, & Lorenz, 2020).…”

Either with Us or Against Us: Business Power and Campaign Contributions in an Age of Hyper-Partisanship

“…That has implications for how we think about business power in an age of congressional division. Even if some scholars have studied outside groups through the lens of a fractured Congress, they mostly concentrate on lobbying behavior and mobilization, not power (for an exception, see Furnas et al 2022). That is curious, considering how many attempts have been made to understand why campaign contributions and lobbying do not produce favorable policy outcomes and why the link between political expenditures and corporate financial performance is weak (for a review, see Lowery 2013).…”

Conflict and salience as drivers of corporate lobbying? An elite survey experiment

“…That is, experimental designs are hardly used in interest group research. To the authors knowledge, this is the third time that such a design has been employed in the field (see La Pira, 2008;Furnas et al, 2022). While experimental studies can yield results that are high in internal validity, the field is dominated by large survey studies.…”

“…The arguments are tested through a 2 × 2 elite survey experiment among German and Dutch corporate lobbyists. This paper thereby offers a unique insight into decisions that corporate lobbyists make concerning their strategies, as experimental designs are rarely employed within the literature on lobbying and interest groups (but see La Pira, 2008; Furnas et al 2022). The two countries under study were selected as most of the research on corporate lobbying has been conducted in distinct pluralist contexts such as the US, UK or the institutions of the European Union (e.g., Boies, 1989; Chalmers, 2018; Salisbury, 1984).…”