When Do Interest Groups Lobby Legislators in Strong Presidential Systems?

Abstract

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.

Lobbying the executives: differences in lobbying patterns between elected politicians, partisan advisors and public servants

“…Consistent with rational choice neo-institutionalism (Kato, 1996), this research provides strong support that the nature of a country's formal political institutions influences lobbyists' venue choice. In presidential systems, like the United States where the legislative branch has a great deal of influence, lobbyists have stronger incentives to the legislature (Baumgartner et al, 2009;Dockendorff and Lodato, 2023;Jieun and Stuckatz, 2023), meanwhile in parliamentary systems, where the executive has a great deal of control over policy (O'Malley, 2007;Thomas and Lewis, 2019), lobbyists tend to primarily target the executive (Boucher, 2015). And more precisely, studying lobbying contacts in Canada, where the locus of executive power is highly concentrated in the hands of the prime minister rather than Cabinet (Savoie, 1999;Cooper, 2017), Boucher (2018) finds that a great deal of lobbying focuses on central agencies, and in particular, the Office of the Prime Minister.…”