Does Lobbying Affect Bill Advancement? Evidence from Three State Legislatures

Many studies consider the effect of lobbying on the behavior of individual legislators, but few studies demonstrate a relationship between lobbying and the ultimate dispositions of bills by the legislature. One challenge to establishing this latter relationship is data scarcity, as few legislatures systematically collect and publish information on organized interests’ lobbying activities on each bill. We provide new insights on lobbying by using data from Colorado, Nebraska, and Wisconsin that records the positions organized interests take on proposals in those states’ legislatures. We find that organized interests’ lobbying predicts outcomes, especially when lobbying is directed against a proposal. We also use our data to test whether lobbying succeeds by building support among legislators (i.e., vote buying) or by affecting a proposal’s advancement through the legislative process (i.e., agenda control). We find that lobbying does not buy the votes of legislators on the committees of jurisdiction for each bill, but lobbying does strongly predict what bills make it onto the agenda. Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions about money and politics, bias in representation, and legislator behavior.