Political science in action!

Both Yglesias and the Sunlight Foundation picked up a New York Times story that broke the following news:

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

For years, political scientists have tried (and more often than not, failed) to prove something that seems intuitively correct--that lobbying affects political outcomes. One explanation for this null finding is that researchers have been using the wrong dependent variable. Instead of looking only at roll call votes, many argue that studies of lobbying influence should focus on legislators' priorities, committee agendas, and other facets of policymaking that are on the whole much more difficult to quantify.

In a 2006 APSR article (walled version here, abstract at the bottom of the post), Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff make an argument in this vein, premised on the idea that legislators' limited staff makes it time-consuming and difficult for them to marshal the information and resources necessary for policymaking. Money exchanged between interest groups and legislators thus acts as a signal that the legislator can use the group's resources--specifically, its information and staff--to help achieve their congruent policy objectives. This relationship is useful to the legislator because while elected officials are generalists, lobbyists are specialists.

"The main idea is that lobbying is primarily a form of legislative subsidy--a matching grant of costly policy information, political intelligence, and labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators. The proximate objective of this strategy is not to change legislators’ minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives." (p 69)

The Genentech incident is thus in line with Hall and Deardorff's model of how lobbyists impact policymaking. Indeed, the quotes in the NYT article emphasize that the incident could not be characterized as persuasion--nobody's mind was being changed by a fancy Genentech dinner party. Instead, lobbyists acted as a sort of volunteer staff, drafting language for busy legislators.

Are such arrangements healthy for democracy? As a citizen, I have some opinions about the matter, but as a social scientist I do not think we have the data to make a definitive statement. The lesson I draw from the Genentech incident is the importance of the work that organizations like the Sunlight Foundation are doing to make government data publicly available. Once it is possible to quickly and easily access searchable databases of items like legislative statements, policy papers, and committee hearing transcripts, I suspect we will uncover many more patterns of lobbying influence than are possible to measure via simple tallies of roll call votes.

Abstract of Hall, Richard & Alan Deardorff (2006). Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy. American Political Science Review, 100:1:69-84.
Professional lobbyists are among the most experienced, knowledgeable, and strategic actors one can find in the everyday practice of politics. Nonetheless, their behavioral patterns often appear anomalous when viewed in the light of existing theories. We revisit these anomalies in search of an alternative theory. We model lobbying not as exchange (vote buying) or persuasion (informative signaling) but as a form of legislative subsidy--a matching grant of policy information, political intelligence,and legislative labor to the enterprises of strategically selected legislators. The proximate political objective of this strategy is not to change legislators’ minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives. The theory is simple in form, realistic in its principal assumptions, and counter intuitive in its main implications.Empirically, the model renders otherwise anomalous regularities comprehensible and predictable. In a later section, we briefly bring preferences back in, examining the important but relatively uncommon conditions under which preference-centered lobbying should occur.